natty first impressions...

[wizard10000]

In addition to the emerald gripe below...

Installed both 32- and 64-bit beta 1 since at least on the 32-bit daily build yesterday the partitioner was broken which was a little scary so I installed beta 1 on both machines. My own first impressions -

* emerald is broken on both 32- and 64-bit but that's a known issue. Apparently emerald doesn't like compiz 1.0.9 - I normally run compiz instead of kwin for its smaller memory footprint plus I get to run my favorite emerald theme - but emerald ain't happening just yet

* compiz ain't really working too great either. KDE + compiz produces some bizarre panel artifiacts if your panel is set to autohide and there's some screen tearing on shutdown, at least on my machines.

* grub2 - 32-bit works fine but 64-bit grub2 is ignoring my /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme. I set menu colors to blue/white and it works on 32-bit and is ignored on 64-bit. update-grub doesn't change the behavior, the boot menu is still white on black.

* dolphin appears to be slightly less than stable - at least on the netbook.

So far it ain't bad and there's nothing that makes Natty unusable, but hopefully they'll get emerald fixed before release date.

[Snowhog]

Re: natty first impressions...

As you can see in my signature, Natty holds top billing of the three K's I run. In my own 'praise of Natty' I noted that this was the first 'alpha' release of Kubuntu I've ever installed (Alpha 3), and I've been using it as my main OS since. I am very impressed by it. Is it perfect? No. There are some 'niggles' that have yet to be resolved, but are not show stoppers in any way.

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

This is the first time I've waited for a beta - normally I install late alphas. I'm not disappointed by any means - I would be if it was a final release but we're still testing.

I understand emerald development stopped some time ago but some folks have picked up the ball and are working on making it run with the current version of compiz. One can grab the current version through git which works with compiz 1.0.9 but that's a little too bleeding edge for me. Hopefully the fix will be in the final.

On second thought, I am a little disappointed in the quality of the installer this late in the game but from what I see it's a fairly common problem. As I mentioned yesterday's daily build had a broken partitioner so I installed beta 1 which is only five days old now. Neither beta 1 installer ran without errors, but at least the errors weren't showstoppers.

[verndog]

Re: natty first impressions...

As you can see in my signature, Natty holds top billing of the three K's I run. In my own 'praise of Natty' I noted that this was the first 'alpha' release of Kubuntu I've ever installed (Alpha 3), and I've been using it as my main OS since. I am very impressed by it. Is it perfect? No. There are some 'niggles' that have yet to be resolved, but are not show stoppers in any way.

Good to know since you've used the last thee K's. Your also using Intel video, I have nvidia. I might have a different view, but right now Ubuntu Natty Unity is troublesome.

[x-shaney-x]

Re: natty first impressions...

Well my impressions from the beta 1 install is that it is generally pretty stable and working well.
In fact I have had less problems than I had with the Maverick final release and it is running much betty than ubuntu unity at the moment.

Some things stand out though:

The addition of audio file importing in digikam and completely un-configurable as to what I can exclude from importing.

Network manager problems - losing internet when logging out and in or switching users. Have to reboot to get it back. Also had this problem in maverick with backports repo.

Dolphin has often suffered from freeze-ups. Also, copying folders or extracting archives often don't show up in the folder I am in, even after moving to another folder and back. If I open a folder and dir it shows they are there.
I usually have to close and re-open dolphin before they show up.

Lost some touchpad options, in particular the option to have it disabled on startup.

Though despite those problems it is still JUST ahead of the unity or other distro options for now.

[SIR_Taco]

Re: natty first impressions...

Not trying to hi-jack the thread... but just curious how the Nvidia (proprietary) situation is with Natty at the moment?

I had tried out a few of the alpha's and everything worked great, but in the last alpha I lost 3D support (XServer version change I believe).

Cheers

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

Not trying to hi-jack the thread... but just curious how the Nvidia (proprietary) situation is with Natty at the moment?

Mine seems to work fine, but it's an older GF9500GT.

[drooghead]

Re: natty first impressions...

Natty is mostly good. The only problems I have encountered are with wireless being disabled and a large memory leak which, over a day's work, will eventually use all the swap space of 4GB.

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

I appear to have cleaned up a bunch of the instability by renaming ~/.kde and starting fresh. Strange, since my old desktop worked perfectly

[blackpaw]

Re: natty first impressions...

Just been using Natty in virtualbox, but loving it - best kubuntu release ever. Currently restricted to one PC at the moment (my wifes 10.04 box), lord I am missing KDE 4.5/4.6

kmail/akonadi is still hiatus, from the dev list looks to be a while yet before we see a KDEPIM 4.6 - they're afraid of repeating the KDE 4.0 debacle.

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

Both 32-and 64-bit devede appear to be broken. They fail while creating the DVD structure, suggesting that I might be out of disk space, which I ain't. I can duplicate this all day long on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

The interesting thing about this is that devede wrote a buncha temp files to the same directory where it's creating either the iso or the DVD tree - I tried both.

[verndog]

Re: natty first impressions...

Natty is the best Kubuntu I have used before. The one big complaint I have is the ugly fonts. I know I can change them, and have tried but either their too big or lopsided. I would prefer to match the same as Ubuntu fonts.

The one other complain I have is not being able to use claws-mail. I tried kmail, and I like it, but detest akonadi, and can't seem to get rid of it.

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

I use claws-mail in KDE and disabling akonadi is fairly simple -

Just set StartServer=false in ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc

[wizard10000]

Re: natty first impressions...

Tracked down the devede problem - apparently the new dvdauthor requires a VIDEO_FORMAT variable that wasn't required before.

http://groups.google.com/group/deved...81fc4948?pli=1

Running in a terminal window and exporting the variable before starting devede within the same window worked. Testing another video file to confirm, but this got things running.

wizard@wizard-desktop:~$ export VIDEO_FORMAT=NTSC
wizard@wizard-desktop:~$ devede

[The Liquidator]

Re: natty first impressions...

Yesterday I upgraded (by way of clean install) from maverick to the natty beta 1 without issue.

With one exception (suspend to Ram which I post about elsewhere) everything seems to work so far.

Like every other upgrade it seems to be incremental rather than a revolution. With all the hype about the 2.6.38 kernel and the "wonder patch" I expected things to go like a rocket. Tbh things do seem a little bit quicker but there's not much in it. The main thing is, nothing got borked.