some misfeatures in the powerpc edition of Breezy

[Albert]

To whom it concerns,

I've been using Kubuntu Hoary and Breezy for a total of 5 months now, and I 
would like to list some of the issues I'm having with it, for lack of any 
other place to get an answer for them.

My system is: PowerBook 3.5, CD-RW/DVD-R, 512 MB SDRAM, 60 GB HD.

- kded: when I insert a CD full of images, the whole computer behaves as 
stalled or very slowly. If I pop up an xterm and run 'top', I can see the 
kded program eating up all my RAM and consuming part of the processor, 
continuously. I have tried to disable this in the System Settings -> System 
Services, but to no avail. After upgrading to Breezy, such area is not even 
working.
Also playing with the settings under /usr/share/services/kded/ *.desktop 
files, such as the mediamanager.desktop, didn't result in anything. I have 
the hunch that some 'autoload' variable has to be set to false somewhere, but 
I simply can't see where, nor can I find proper documentation.

- updatedb: when my laptop is on battery, the last thing I want is for its 
energy to be spent unwisely. Running the cron job for the updatedb, which 
runs for several minutes consuming lots of chip resources, is a very poor 
choice. I have no clue as to whether one can make the updatedb process run if 
and only if the laptop is not on battery. The pbbuttons daemon should be 
queried for such information.

- airport wireless card: every time the computer wakes up, the airport is 
powered up, or so does a screen message claim. This is not desirable, at 
least for battery energy preservation, and further for security issues. If 
the airport card was not up when I put the computer to sleep, so it should 
remain when I wake it up. Having to run 'sudo iwconfig eth1 power off' every 
time is not very practical.

- opengl and/or X.org issues: I can run glxgears locally on any of the 
computers I have around here, including this powerbook running kubuntu. But 
not through ssh -X : the glxgears or blender or any other opengl-dependent 
application refuse to launch, displaying a permission error problem. I have 
filed in a bug report on this in the kubuntu bug tracker.

- konqueror images: when loading images in full, many times a yellowish tint 
is set over the image right after the image has been properly loaded and 
displayed. I have no clue as to why this happens.

- kmail crashes: kmail works very well except for this situation: on imap 
accounts, when deleting two messages too quickly (pushing the trash icon 
twice), the second one is being loaded while being deleted as well, and this  
 results in a crash. The crash reporter has an empty backtrace, since I assume 
kmail has been compiled without a '-g' debugging option.

- java: the installed 'gij' I suspect has been setup so that openoffice can 
work, and it does work very well for that purpose. But any GUI java 
applications will not run. I had to manually download and install the 
IBM-1.4.2-ppc compiled java from non-kubuntu sources. It works very well by 
the way.


That is all. Now some praising: I am using kubuntu as a proof of concept. I 
have been able to do with the minimum effort everything that I do on the 
macosx side of the same laptop, and in some instances, even better. 
Applications such as Blender or Gimp run faster than in the macosx side, and 
so far all web development I've done from this machine has been flowing 
steady and nicely. So good job and thanks to whoever setup this fantastically 
user friendly GNU/Linux distribution.

Albert
-- 
Albert Cardona
Molecular Cell Developmental Biology
University of California Los Angeles
Tel +1 310 2067376
Programming: http://www.pensament.net/java/
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