Posts Tagged "kubuntu"

KDE 4 on Kubuntu – Part II

November 18th, 2009

It’s been a while since I first tried KDE 4 on Kubuntu, but as I recently bought a new machine, I figured I’d give it another whirl. Admittedly, I didn’t have much choice in this matter if I wanted to install a recent version of Kubuntu, as they moved to using KDE 4 as the default quite a while ago, but Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) comes with KDE 4.3, the latest full version that was released not too long ago.

The install process was nice and smooth, with everything just working out of the box, which was certainly a nice feature. The one thing that needed a bit of manual intervention was the installation of some non-free components, such as the nVidia graphics drivers so as to get 3D acceleration, but this wasn’t too much trouble (although editing the XOrg.conf file is probably beyond a real beginner).

Given that almost two years has passed, I was hopeful that there’d been progress, and I wasn’t disappointed. The niggles that I had previously noticed with KDE 4 were gone, and I can now have a sensibly sized panel, displaying only the current desktop’s activities in the task bar, along with a couple of useful widget on the desktop. The settings are all there, and applications that were missing last time, like Kontact, are now back and ready to go.

One of the other applications that has been updated since I last used KDE is Amarok. Now on version 2.2, a whole load of changes have occurred – including some rather drastic ones to the UI. Unfortunately, it seems to me that performance has dropped considerably – with it taking minutes and 100% CPU in order to do basic tasks such as adding a track to the play list. I’m currently wondering if this performance (or lack thereof) is down to the database, as previously I’d migrated to using MySQL rather than the default SQLite. I’m tempted to look into this again, as the performance is a bit of a joke at the moment. One other thing I’ve noticed, is that the on screen display doesn’t always work – instead only appearing intermittently and with no real consistent cause for it (not) appearing.

All in all the experience is a lot better than where it was, and it’s great to see that it’s come on in such leaps and bounds since the original release almost two years ago – and I’m certainly not looking at other desktop environments to move to!

 

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Hardy Heron

April 27th, 2008

So, this week the new version of Ubuntu (and therefore Kubuntu) was released; version 8.04 LTS – aka Hardy Heron (and a variety of other names…). As a result I decided this weekend to update my desktop (previously running Gutsy Gibbon) to this using the update manager.

Previous updates haven’t gone so well, and last time the update manager crashed out during the upgrade; leaving in place some stuff that caused my machine not to boot until I managed to track down the cause and uninstall it from a maintenance prompt. This time, however, things seemed better and the upgrade went without a hitch… until I rebooted.

It was at this time that I discovered that no longer were my drives appearing as /dev/hd<foo><bar>, but as /dev/sd<baz><gaz>. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I been using my drives by uuid in /etc/fstab. I wasn’t, and this is probably my fault as they were updated during the edgy upgrade but I changed the file and got rid of them somewhere between edgy and feisty.

So, after some jiggery pokery I got that problem solved and my machine was back up and booting, although I can’t seem to find my DVD drive anywhere in /dev, and a post on the ubuntu forums suggests that some drives might not be compatible with things (who wants to bet that mine is one of them).

This aside I’ve not had any problems so far. I’m still running KDE3, so can’t comment on the KDE4 variant, and haven’t played around with the desktop effects stuff. One thing that I did notice, however, was the decision to ship with Firefox 3 beta 5 by default, which most of the plugins I use don’t support. This was soon fixed by reinstalling Firefox 2 and manually updating the symlink in /usr/bin (as for some reason it doesn’t use /etc/alternatives unlike a lot of other applications).

All in all this has gone pretty smoothly… although it could have been better, and I would like my DVD drive to work at some point (although I only really used it for watching films, which I can do on the xbox instead now)

 

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KDE4 on Kubuntu

January 13th, 2008

So, the other day KDE4 was released, with a new interface and widgets and whatnot. It all looked pretty shiny, and I finally got around to installing the kubuntu packages for it this morning.

It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.

Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great – especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) – I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.

Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.

I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these – but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.

All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.

Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.

 

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