Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

[Fintan]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I had opensuse 11.2 and mandrake for quite a while for testing.

I see no "stability" differences between 11.2, mandrake and kubuntu 9.10.

Lucid is still beta, and apart from akonadi / google resouces issues in Lucid I have no problem with stability.

as mentioned above for me it boils down to package management ( I prefer apt-get, synaptic) and eye candy / overall graphic design (here kubuntu lacks).

Also Opensuse/madrake come with nice system setting options which are special to those distro's.

As for graphic consistency:
Other than that I see kubuntu as a more "virgin" implementation of kde and changing that to ones tastes is not all that difficult any more. Getting a nice wall paper is easy, configuring KDM and KDM splash is easy as well. Implementing a grub screen has never been easier. combining the three takes a bit of work. That leaves plymouth. Have a look here:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3110728.0

I have heard that wireless works better with opensuse/mandrake than Kubuntu but have not tested that.

On the other hand no distro would be good enough to get me to leave this forum
Just my 2.5 cents

[kevinc]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I installed Lucid Alpha and tried that, with upgrades. Also downloaded the beta 1 and installed that as sometimes fresh installs work better than upgrades from earlier releases.

Start up time is faster on a 2004 Toshiba Satelite A40 with 512MB ram. Networking initially worked well with DHCP LAN, then had a problem, now it works but it takes maybe 20 seconds to connect. I haven't made any changes to networking. Wallpaper is not too bad. I tried the recommended ext4 for the first time for all partitions and haven't had any problems yet. (I've mostly used ext3 before.)

It has crashed a couple of times, once it was able to recover, the other time the screen saver wouldn't accept the password, no keys including esc, alt sys req had any effect, so I powered off.

Whatever minor problems there are should mostly be ironed out by the release date.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

wow, not even the open drivers work? My really old Radeon Mobility 7500 has had good support there since at least Jaunty, and my newer built-in Radeon HD3200 has desktop effects and HDMI audio with the open drivers in lucid now. A gap between the closed and open drivers in terms of chipset support is not good.

ATI won't continue patching, fixing or adding to "legacy" drivers. FOSS coders reverse engineer the proprietary binary drivers (because even ATI won't release their source code or engineering data), but when no additions to the legacy drivers are made FOSS coders have nothing to reverse. The old binaries expect to see certain kernel variables and memory spaces but when those have been changed in the newer kernels the old binaries can't install, so they abend. The new kernels don't have the legacy variables in their memory space so they can't interact. catch-22.

Anyway, I refrain from slagging other distros for the reasons in the above post. My Chakra install is good enough, but the gui package manager is simply aweful for me as it always crashes, literally every time I run i, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to update my system, with it. I don't always want to use the command line for package management, so in my case it is an issue. Does that make Arch awful? far from it. In any case, I see either in their forum or from my personal usage, most of the same problems found here, and I am sure in other KDE distros have them as well.

Good decision about slagging. Most distro issues are not about the distro as much as they are about the person using it. Some distros require a HIGH amount of technical skill in order to use them successfully, but they reward those that have that skill with the most control over their distro that one can attain. Other distros are so easy to use "a caveman could do it", but to get that ease of use they have to be automatic in many of their functions. Just how much control does one want to give up for ease of use? That is a personal decision based on one's comfort level. I've run both kinds of distros. In the mid and late 90's there was only one kind of distro -- the first kind -- until SuSE 5.3/KDE/YAST came along. The older I get, however, and/or the more I want to just use my computer and not fiddle with its controls, the more I find myself gravitating toward the "so easy a caveman can do it" type of distro. The phrase "It just works" is another form of the "it's so easy a caveman ..." expression. That is why I've used Mandriva, PCLinuxOS and Kubuntu. All three are, IMO, equally easy to use, but Kubuntu could configure accelerated 3D video on this Sony when Mandriva could not, and PCLinuxOS didn't want to move to KDE4. They made my choice for me. Then I found this forum!

P.S. -- there are distros featuring GNOME that are as equally easy to use as Kubuntu or Mandriva or PCLinuxOS, but I prefer KDE4 over GNOME, so I didn't consider distros featuring GNOME in my discussion.

[kubicle]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

ATI won't continue patching, fixing or adding to "legacy" drivers. FOSS coders reverse engineer the proprietary binary drivers (because even ATI won't release their source code or engineering data), but when no additions to the legacy drivers are made FOSS coders have nothing to reverse.

The open source drivers for ati cards (radeon, radeonhd etc.) do not depend on reverse engineering. The latest work is based on specs released by AMD/ATI. Even though the proprietary drivers are not an option for people with older cards, the open source drivers are good for most cards, and the list of supported cards seems to grow at a nice pace.

Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic...FOSS#ATI.2FAMD
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...md_r600_oss_3d
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/

[Casper315]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I have to give Lucid a B+
Everything that I have tested seems to work well (so far).
Power Management Functions
Epson Stylus CX4600 Printer, Scanner
Logitech Anywhere Mouse (with Btnx installed and configured)
Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro (tested with Cheese)
Yamaha NX-U10 USB Speakers
USB Drives, USB Hard Drives
PulseAudio (works without bashing my head against the wall!!
Basic Apps I use everyday seem to work without a hitch:
Firefox
Thunderbird
Keepassx
Amarok, VLC, Smplayer, Audacious.. and others

Machine tested is a Dell Inspiron 1318 with Intel Graphics, 3 GIG RAM, 320 HD.

The ONLY problem I've had as with many others is the Boot-Up Splash Screen. It's inconsistent and gives error messages such as: mountall failed to connect, among others. Seeing as this is still technically a Beta 2 release, I would say that is pretty outstanding. My main machine is a Dell XPS M1330 with NVIDIA Graphics and it has it's own problems, but again with the Boot-Up Screen ONLY. Excellent!

[blackpaw]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

I had opensuse 11.2 and mandrake for quite a while for testing.

I see no "stability" differences between 11.2, mandrake and kubuntu 9.10.

Lucid is still beta, and apart from akonadi / google resouces issues in Lucid I have no problem with stability.

Agree 100% I regularly give OpenSUSE a spin, especially when some issue in kubuntu drive me nuts - but I usually run into exactly the same issue on OpenSUSE as they are KDE issues rather than distro issues.

Like you said - package management and artwork. I vastly prefer deb to rpm and prefer the KDE native branding to SUSE branding, so kubuntu wins every time for me.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Kubuntu 10.04 Beta Impressions

......
The open source drivers for ati cards (radeon, radeonhd etc.) do not depend on reverse engineering. The latest work is based on specs released by AMD/ATI. Even though the proprietary drivers are not an option for people with older cards, the open source drivers are good for most cards, and the list of supported cards seems to grow at a nice pace.
......

It has in the past and I assumed such efforts were still on-going. A bad assumption on my part? I'm not sure...

In August of 2008 I purchased this Sony VAIO notebook, which featured the GM45 video chip. I bought it because Intel said, in a June 16th announcement, that they released the Linux source code for the driver of the GM45. When I booted up Mandriva 2009 Power Pack I was presented with a blank, light gray screen with mottling in the corners. The mouse and keyboard were no usable. I had to use XFDrake to set an xorg.conf that loaded a VESA driver in order to get a desktop. At the suggestion of Adam Williams, who worked for Mandriva at the time, I filed a bug report on the Xorg bugszilla on Oct 17, 2008, which was subsequently found to be a duplicate, after 200 posts by various people, of this bug. I followed those bugs with interest. My assumption was that since they had the Intel source code for the Linux driver modifying it for a distro would be an easy task, especially if they had a copy of Intel's driver spec data was well. Seems I was wrong. Watching them flail about for solutions to my and several other problems it was obvious that if they had spec on the GM45 it was either very erroneous or incomplete, and the Linux source code that Intel released for the GM45 was equally ineffective for many OEM implementations of the GM45, like mine, for example.

They even asked for a copy of people's video ROM;

Did I already ask one of you for a copy of your video ROM (I don't seem to have a copy on this machine at least)? It should be available in your sysfs directory:
# cd /sys/devices/pci0000\:00/0000\:00\:02.0/
# echo 1 > rom
# cat rom > /tmp/rom.bin
# echo 0 > rom
then attach your rom.bin to this bug.

That is what you do when specs and first source isn't complete. (MS, btw, had no problem creating working video drivers for their OS .... it seems to me they were given info that the FOSS developers weren't ... ?)

Once they got the primary accelerated video screen working on my Sony I found that I could not get the secondary screen working. Thus, SecondLife would look like I was looking at it through a vertical venetian blind. Stellarium would show stars but the menus and config dialogs were hopelessly scrambled. I'd send them captures of my screens so they could see what it looked like. On Feb 3, 2009 they pushed the KMS patch for the i915 driver onto git.

I began waiting for the fix to trickle down to Mandriva. I figured it would take at least 3 to 6 months. Then, Kubuntu Jaunty announced that they were using KDE 4.2.1 (Mandriva was sticking with 4.1.2) so I decided to try the Jaunty Alpha LiveCD. I was STUNNED to see accelerated video configured and working well! I made the following post on March 26, 2009.

I am running a Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H laptop. While running Mandriva 2009 PWP
I consistently got a grey screen, not a black one. I used VESA for several
months as a workaround. Strangly, it allowed me a slightly accelerated video.
GoogleEarth and Stellarium were jumpy, but usable.

I was waiting for the fix to trickle down to Mandriva when I noticed that
Kunbuntu 9.04 was featuring KDE 4.2, so I decided to give the LiveCD a try.
Imagine my surprise when it gave me a fully functional 3D accelerated video.
Stellarium give 67 fps and GoogleEarth is as smooth as silk! It uses the
2.6.28-11-generic kernel and i915 video driver.

Mandriva had been using the i810 driver but Jaunty used the i915. Interestingly, folks were reporting failures in the Xorg bug report with the i915 driver.

The Xorg bug hunters were not depending on any spec documents, or the source Intel released. Their analysis of the problem as being a faulty sum in the htotal variable (register?) wasn't due to any specs or code they read. Since, as the thread shows, they were dumping OEM video ROM and analyzing it (which is reverse engineering) As far as the Phoronix citation is concerned, there are also many like this one in which it is noted:

For those that have missed our past articles on the R500 status in Linux , up to this point the only real solution with 3D support has been using the fglrx binary blob. However, five developers have been working on reverse engineering the fglrx driver for R500 support for the past couple of months....