Howdy, I've been using Gentoo for a few years, but my wife never had the patience for compiling. Finally I convinced her to dump Windows on her laptop and we installed Kubuntu yesterday. So far we have had nothing but problems. I'm hoping you guys can help me out.
1 - The binary ATI driver is not loading correctly. DRI is failing and when I run fglrxinfo I'm getting the Mesa error. We have a Radeon X300 on her laptop, and I followed the following guide, including the so called "mesa-fix".
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
2 - There appears to be no package for the sun-java6-plugin, nor a sun-java5-plugin on x64. Given that Sun has always supported x64, and most of the Sun Java code is GPL'ed now, I found this disheatening, especially when all the documentation and forum posts I've found keep saying just "apt-get install sun-java6-plugin". I'd sure like to if the package existed for me.
3 - Kicker, Krunner, and Kdesktop have each crashed at least twice in the first 24 hours. I updated to the latest KDE, and still we've had crashes. memtest is good, and the HDD is good as far as I know. We never really had any problems with apps crashing in Windows x64.
4 - We've had all kinds of crazy issues with her touchpad and the keyboard. I'm not sure if this is Xorg or the Kernel, but I may trying upgrading the kernel later. Her touchpad isn't very responsive, and again we didn't have any issues with it in Windows. If we hit a key on the keyboard, often it will pause, repeat ten times, or not repeat when we want it to. If you hold down backspace, it won't repeat at all for instance. When I'm typing, I'll randomly get ten t's in a row. However, at times I will be tapping left repeatedly on the console, and waiting as it takes a few seconds before the cursor moves.
5 - This may be a Windows issue, but I have a printer shared on a Win2k box, which is a temporary thing, trust me. However, I'm upgrading all the hardware in my desktop, and I'm waiting on the time to reinstall Windows x64 and Gentoo on my new desktop. In the mean time, I needed a box up to share files and printers, so I put up one of my old clunkers. From Windows I could see the Printer shared, but in Linux, I can only see the file folders shared, and not the printer.
6 - I know this is vague, but overall performance and system responsiveness has been a bit disappointing. OpenOffice in particular loads incredibly slow. Honestly, I may just build a new toolchain with some of the Suse patches, and then compile OpenOffice with the -Bdirect flag, because we tried Suse briefly, and OpenOffice did load quicker on that. A big reason for choosing Kubuntu is that we heard it was supposed to be a very fast distro. Are there any guides for speeding up Ubuntu/Kubuntu out of the box?
As a suggestion, I would have liked to see either Reiser4 or Ext4 support. Your HDD is often the slowest component on your computer, and using a fast FS can and does make a difference.
I hate to sound so negative. My wife loves KDE and is eager to learn Linux. However, we're hoping we can find solutions for some of these problems.
1 - The binary ATI driver is not loading correctly. DRI is failing and when I run fglrxinfo I'm getting the Mesa error. We have a Radeon X300 on her laptop, and I followed the following guide, including the so called "mesa-fix".
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
2 - There appears to be no package for the sun-java6-plugin, nor a sun-java5-plugin on x64. Given that Sun has always supported x64, and most of the Sun Java code is GPL'ed now, I found this disheatening, especially when all the documentation and forum posts I've found keep saying just "apt-get install sun-java6-plugin". I'd sure like to if the package existed for me.
3 - Kicker, Krunner, and Kdesktop have each crashed at least twice in the first 24 hours. I updated to the latest KDE, and still we've had crashes. memtest is good, and the HDD is good as far as I know. We never really had any problems with apps crashing in Windows x64.
4 - We've had all kinds of crazy issues with her touchpad and the keyboard. I'm not sure if this is Xorg or the Kernel, but I may trying upgrading the kernel later. Her touchpad isn't very responsive, and again we didn't have any issues with it in Windows. If we hit a key on the keyboard, often it will pause, repeat ten times, or not repeat when we want it to. If you hold down backspace, it won't repeat at all for instance. When I'm typing, I'll randomly get ten t's in a row. However, at times I will be tapping left repeatedly on the console, and waiting as it takes a few seconds before the cursor moves.
5 - This may be a Windows issue, but I have a printer shared on a Win2k box, which is a temporary thing, trust me. However, I'm upgrading all the hardware in my desktop, and I'm waiting on the time to reinstall Windows x64 and Gentoo on my new desktop. In the mean time, I needed a box up to share files and printers, so I put up one of my old clunkers. From Windows I could see the Printer shared, but in Linux, I can only see the file folders shared, and not the printer.
6 - I know this is vague, but overall performance and system responsiveness has been a bit disappointing. OpenOffice in particular loads incredibly slow. Honestly, I may just build a new toolchain with some of the Suse patches, and then compile OpenOffice with the -Bdirect flag, because we tried Suse briefly, and OpenOffice did load quicker on that. A big reason for choosing Kubuntu is that we heard it was supposed to be a very fast distro. Are there any guides for speeding up Ubuntu/Kubuntu out of the box?
As a suggestion, I would have liked to see either Reiser4 or Ext4 support. Your HDD is often the slowest component on your computer, and using a fast FS can and does make a difference.
I hate to sound so negative. My wife loves KDE and is eager to learn Linux. However, we're hoping we can find solutions for some of these problems.
<br />
"factual bug".
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