First Impressions of Kubuntu 8.10

[Lindsay Mathieson]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:27:40 am Derek Broughton wrote:
> I'm impressed more by the eye-candy than I expected to be.
>
> 1) I use on-board Intel graphics (was the i810 driver, is now intel).  When
> the X server failed to start with the upgrade-process-modified xorg.conf,
> it should have just automatically tried the "generic" config, rather than
> presenting the user with multiple, confusing, and largely meaningless
> options.

Yah I've had problems with the xconfig with every upgrade. I just wipe and run 
nvidia-xconfig now, but not for the casual user.

>
> 2) I can find no way to tell it which of my two monitors is the primary -
> nor to tell it that the external monitor is "to the right of" rather than a
> clone.  Which results in the primary monitor always being the external. 
> This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't still apparently impossible to have
> two panels, with integrated taskbar and system tray, one on each monitor -
> and the primary (ie, the external) keeps stealing my panel.

I belive this is scheduled for the next rev of KDE - 4.2 (January)
>
> 3) Panels: I can't move the panel to the top of the screen where it
> belongs, and if I add another (which _does_ go to the top of the screen, I
> can't put anything visible in it - I added a System tray, I know, because
> when I right-clicked on the panel it first asked if I wanted to remove the
> tray, but you couldn't see it)

Just tried adding a second panel and adding the menu widget to it - worked for 
me. The system tray is just a container for notification icons and is invisible 
when empty.

>
> 4) Konqueror, of course:
>  a) I could probably live with Dolphin, if only it had a Tree view!

Has been answered by others in later messages.

>  b) where on earth is the "back" button?  What use is a browser without a
> back button?

Definitely there normally.

Maybe you have a borked KDE setup? did you upgrade from KDE 3?

Might be worthwhile backuing up and deleting your .kde, .kderc and .kde4 (if 
present) directories and rebooting.

>
> 5) Kontact: <sob>  Nothing seems changed at all, let alone for the better. 
> The developers still refuse to apply the patch that permits cross-posting
> without jumping through hoops  (cross-posting to newsgroups is NOT evil!);
> it still crashes too easily (this is my second attempt at this post).
> splitter pane positions are still forgotten (in both knode and akregator,
> at least).

Yes, apart from the upgrade to QT4 nothing has changed in Kontact. On the 
bright side they do seem to be doing stuff in trunk.

One bug I ran into - check the Dictionary is set to a installed language in 
your KMail Identity. If not that will cause heaps of crashes.


> 6) Pretty well any appearance-related configuration was dropped in the
> upgrade.  Now I have to go through and fix _all_ of my toolbars.  Sometimes
> many times (I keep getting text on the KNode toolbars).  Aargh!  No tool
> tips on the new icons, either!  Maybe I'll have to keep the text.

Toolbars are improving, but I still have problems in Aggregator. PITA.

>
> 7) Very minor, but you apparently get a choice of exactly two desktop
> backgrounds - ugly, or plain grey.  

Definitely not normal. See "Borked" advice :)


> 9) and I've lost my (vital) ksysguard applet which was displaying the
> temperature.  I daresay that will be easy enough to fix. --
> derek

There are plasmoids that do that.

Cheers,

-- 
Lindsay
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~blackpaw1/album