First Impressions of Kubuntu 8.10

[Derek Broughton]

Lindsay Mathieson wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:27:40 am Derek Broughton wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> I belive this is scheduled for the next rev of KDE - 4.2 (January)

That's the sort of thing that really ticks off the users.  This _worked_ in 3.5, and there's no excuse for it to be so broken now.

>> 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.

Whenever I add a panel, it's just a black bar, and anything I put in it is equally black.  Black on black works for formal occasions, but not on my desktop. :-)

>> 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.

Hardly "others" - thanks for that, Lindsay - works a charm in both Dolphin & Konqueror, though I don't think you can actually configure it _from_ konqueror.

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

Yes, I've fixed that too.  I don't know _why_ it wasn't there, but I ended up clicking on the <defaults> button in the toolbar config, and then I had back, forward and up icons.  So, just  another thing that didn't migrate well. 

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

I'd hate to consider it b0rked :-)  But yes...
 
> Might be worthwhile backuing up and deleting your .kde, .kderc and
> .kde4 (if present) directories and rebooting.

That is _not_ happening!  I'll get in there and edit config files by hand before I just throw away the last 10 years of configuration :-)

>> 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.

It appears to be so in both KMail and KNode (though, interestingly, _different_ languages, when they should both have been either "English" or "English - Canada").

>> 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.

I'm sure, but it just means I now have to figure out _how_.  It's fairly necessary because my acpi thermal doesn't properly reset after hibernation, and I need that sensor to show me that things are going critical...
-- 
derek