8.10 impressions

[Willy K. Hamra]

Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> Well, since I managed hose my package dependencies and nuke my KDE setup 
> (hint: don't use the Citadel hardy repo to install Citadel) I thought I'd give 
> the Intrepid Beta a try. My home directory resides on a separate hard disk so 
> its relatively easy.
> 
> The CD install is easier than ever, no difficulties with hardware etc. The 
> manual partition setup made it very easy to select my second hard disk for the 
> home directory without formating it, while erasing my old hardy primary 
> install. From CDROM boot to up and running with a new install was 15 minutes, 
> amazingly fast and straightforward. My sound, network, usb printer, keyboard 
> and mouse were all correctly detected – particularly impressed with the 
> printer detection, even got the exact model (Samsung ML2010). I was browsing 
> the web right away, no doubt this was far faster than I could have with XP or 
> Vista.
> 
> My LCD was being driven in native 1280x104 (VESA mode?) Of course my onboard 
> nvidia 6100 was not configured but I managed to enable it via the restricted 
> hardware applet. Had to hunt for that through the menus and it failed the first 
> time. Second time was fine.
> 
> Nice new feature in the restricted dialog, like envy it gives you a choice of 
> driver versions, for now 173, 177 (recommended) and 96.
> 
> Install Scores out of 10:
> ----------------------------------
> Ease of Use : 10
> Hardware Detection : 9 (Would be 10 if Canonical could auto setup restricted 
> drivers).
> Newbie friendliness : 9.5
> 
> Its really that good – I am way impressed. Anyone casually familiar with 
> computers could be up and running with minimal to no hand holding – so long as 
> they had non funky hardware :) But that applies to every system.
> 
> Desktop
> -----------
> I erased my Hardy .kde & .kde4 entries, I wanted a fresh setup – don't know 
> how well they would have migrated.
> It is KDE 4.1.2 of course, plasma through and through. I've got quite used to 
> it, definitely way more usable than 4.0. I actually quite like the new menu 
> now. Still sucks finding programs on it but once you get your favourites setup 
> that's not such an issue. I'm a command line junkie anyway.
> 
> There's a decent set of plasmoid's in the repos now, but you have to know how 
> to search for them (apt-cache search plasmoid) and how to configure them. I 
> think there's a need for a plasmoid wizard here.
> 
> Kontact – still has all the same old bugs as ever, or more accurately Kmail 
> does. IMAP works so long as you don't stress it. Forget about using the 
> groupware features for anything except contacts. However it does look great 
> and integrates well. And Aggregator is brilliant.
> 
> Hardware
> -------------
> Well all my hardware worked fine :) but nothing fancy there. However one big 
> improvement which I presume is down to the new kernel – for the first time ever 
> with my board sound still works after a hibernate or suspend. In fact Amarok 
> resumes playing perfectly after a restore. This means I may never reboot again 
> :)
> 
> Over all I'm really pleased with this release, normally I don't run beta's on 
> my desktop but this has been well worth it.
> 

I'm glad everything is working fine for you, Lindsay, we surely need
someone complimenting rather than just complaining about intrepid.
my experience with Intrepid wasn't as easy as yours, but then, i started
with alpha5, and back then, specifically in that alpha, jockey (the
restricted drivers manager) was broken, and i had to do some manual
digging to get my nVidia set up. Sound was never an issue for me in any
version of *buntu. People might remember that i said intrepid is the
first version of kubuntu to allow me to hibernate. well, now it won't
anymore. i type sudo pm-hibernate in konsole, the screen goes back to
some TTY, and i get an error that no swap was found. i have 2 GB of
swap, and the system is well aware of them, and "cat /proc/swaps" shows
me that this swap partition is being used. but hibernate can't seem to
find it :(
other than that, i have no problems except for some rendering glitches.
specially when there is a non-qt (non-KDE?) app running, like
thunderbird, wine, and few others. plasmoids are amusing, and can be
quite helpful. i compiled the winembed plasmoid i found somewhere on the
net, which lets me embed a window into a plasmoid on the desktop. i find
 this the most useful plasmoid. i mainly keep 2 of it, one for kopete,
the other for konsole.
The new menu is also nice, i don't mind the extra 2 clicks for accessing
a lot of stuff, but once the favourites are set up, it becomes real handy.
the quick access plasmoid, usually comes by default in the bottom panel
and pointing to the home directory, i find this plasmoid very helpful,
and i always browse my home directory through it, and open my files from
there, since dolphin is a pain in the a** for browsing.

-- 
Willy K. Hamra
Manager of Hamra Information Systems
Co. Manager of Zeina Computer & Billy Net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: w_hamra1987.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 130 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20081012/8fff8f5e/attachment.vcf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20081012/8fff8f5e/attachment.sig>