Impressions of Gutsy (Was: First impressions of dolphin)

[Steve Lamb]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Steve Lamb wrote:
[ snip ]

> Sure, you've killed hald-addon-storage, but all the memory that was being
> reported did not belong to that process.  Some of it would have been shared
> with other parts of hald, so you've killed one thread and freed some
> storage, but not as much as you thought.

    Granted.  Still every bit helps.

> I wouldn't expect there to be, but cpufreq would get restarted next boot,
> unless you either found the switch (in either acpi or the hal .fdi files)
> or blacklisted the cpufreq driver module.

    Which is why I am frustrated at the lack clear directions either inside
the interface (KDE) or on the hard drive on where to configure this
stuff.  I've dug through /etc/hal, /usr/share/doc/hal/, man -k hal, and
there's not a whole lot on how to configure this stuff.

>>     However unable to find where to
>> properly get rid of that and the lack of documentation in /usr/share/doc/
>> prompted me to drop KUbuntu on the laptop and reinstall Debian.

> And it was better on Debian?  I'd be really surprised to find documentation
> in Debian that didn't exist in Ubuntu.

    Well, there is a difference between Ubuntu and Debian in that Ubuntu is
built upon Debian and adds to it.  It just seemed like most of the stuff
I was ripping out was put there to be a convenience for modern hardware.
 Starting out on a distribution which is not adding so much might be
better for older hardware.  I might have to rip stuff out but I'm
inclined to believe I'll be ripping out less.

    There's also that and the fact that I have over a decade of Debian
experience on many machines under my belt.  I moved to Ubuntu because of
my frustration of Debian not addressing modern hardware conveniently
enough.  That is why my gaming box is still KUbuntu and most likely to
remain so.  Of course it has a Gb of RAM so a few dozen|hundred K taken
up by daemon threads will not concern me as much as on a 256Mb machine
which I use for all my productivity work.

    And truth be told the straw last night was the fact that I wanted to
give XFCE4 a whirl to see if dropping KDE would help more than my nickel
and dime stuff.  Loaded xubuntu-desktop with aptitude, logged out, reset
KDM, set my session to XFCE, logged in and was instantly greeted with a
blank screen.  xfce4-panel segfaults, rxvt which worked under KDE
segfaults under XFCE4, nothing that I tried to run worked, it all
segfaulted.  I've never had something that bad happen under base Debian
when switching between KDE/XFCE4 so just decided to go back to stable
for a while and work my way back up.  I've put off my work on this
laptop too long.

> You're tearing your hair out to very little effect - I'm convinced that
> except for the cpufreq problem, your system wouldn't be noticeably changed
> by the other issues.

    You are most likely right.  But at this point KUbuntu's off that system
for the time being.  Don't get me wrong, I like KUbuntu on my game
machine.  I am stoked that I've got EVE and WoW working under base wine
and all I had to do was install and go.  That's exactly what I am
looking for on my game machine.  So I'm not soured on KUbuntu as a
whole, just on my ancient laptop.  Chances are if I get a modern laptop
I'll give KUbuntu another whirl on it and won't care about all of these
programs running as I'll have the space to not care.

    Anyway, thank you for your input, it was very helpful and much
appreciated.  That and I learned that I was mistaken about what a tool
was reporting to me.  It's always good to be disabused of bad
information.

-- 
Steve Lamb