Hi there, I've installed Kubuntu 9.04 64-bit on this ASUS laptop that I just bought. So far my experience has been pleasant for the most part, but I still have a large amount of problems. You don't have to read them all (this wall of text probably seems a bit intimidating), I appreciate any answer.
Without further ado, let's go.
Please reply even if you don't have the answers to all of the problems mentioned above.
Thanks in advance!
Without further ado, let's go.
- First, I can't play music while on battery power. The music plays but stutters, it's very noticeable and very annoying. Even with the power plan set to "Performance", and VLC having realtime CPU and I/O priority, the music doesn't play properly. On A/C power, the song stutters in the first few seconds, but then plays fine. The media player used doesn't seem to affect this (I tried VLC, mplayer, Songbird, and Amarok, they all do the same). The filesystem where the song is doesn't matter either, I can't play it from NTFS partition or my home (ext4) partition. Copying it on an external device like a USB key doesn't help either. I can, however, play it on Windows, so it's not a hardware issue.
- Second, how to enable tap-to-click and the "right-side-of-the-touchpad-scrolls-the-window" feature? I once installed Kubuntu 9.04 64-bit on another laptop and these two features were available out-of-the-box, but it doesn't seem to be the case here (using the same installation CD), and I can't find any mention about this in the system settings.
- Third, how to disable Kbluetooth4 and Klipper, and remove their icons? I don't use them and don't want them cluttering up my system tray.
- Fourth, though this might not be the right place to ask: The global Auto-Type hotkey for KeePassX seems to "unregister" after a while and stops working until I reopen KeePassX from the tray, go to its settings, then click OK to save the settings again. The password database isn't locked or anything; the hotkey works sometimes but not others in a weird pattern. It's probably a problem with KeePassX itself (it should use KDE's hotkey API anyway), so I guess it's not the right place to ask this, but if anyone knows the solution...
- Fifth, the Network Manager. My only Internet access right now is a 3G USB key. Its box says "works on Windows and Mac OS X", so I assumed it also meant "does not work on Linux" (otherwise they would brag about it on the box too, right?). I plugged it in and a "ttyusb0 device inserted" notification appeared. The "Mobile Broadband" tab, however, was available in the network manager preferences, but when I add a connection (it asks between a GSM and CDMA connection, what are those and what is the difference?), it asks for a bunch of numbers and other information which I don't know/have. I guess they're written into the USB key and the Windows software provided with the key prevents the user from having to type these things. I abandoned the idea and thought I just would go Internet-less for a while. But I happened to have another (Windows) computer at hand, so I installed the software for the 3G key on that other computer and created a "ad-hoc" network with "Internet Connection Sharing" of the 3G connection. Then I booted up my computer on Windows, it worked fine, I could join the wireless ad-hoc network and browse the Internet, but while I do see the wireless network on Linux, I can't seem to connect to it: the network manager just stands there for a minute and then says "Connection on interface wlan0 failed" after a while, even when removing the WEP/WPA key from the ad-hoc network.
- Sixth, and this is a minor issue, but when I double-click a video in Dolphin, it opens in VLC (I installed VLC 1.0.0 from the PPA linked from videolan.org) but the video is on the left of the VLC window (there is one big black vertical bar on the right of the video, rather than two equally-wide vertical bars). When I resize or maximize the VLC window, however, it gets centered (there are two equally-wide vertical bars on each side). I'd like it to be centered from the start if possible
- Seventh, while hovering large video files in Dolphin (excluding .mkv videos, it seems), it freezes up for a long while that seems proportional to the length or size of the video. It's really annoying. I guess it kind of tries to do a "Preview" to get a thumbnail of the video, but even if that was the case, it doesn't seem to be displayed at all: the right sidebar, which does show the thumbnails for images, doesn't seem to do so for videos, so the freezing become both annoying and useless. Is there any way to disable that (while keeping the nice image previews)?
- Eighth, and this is a minor issue: I never use Caps Lock, so I thought I'd disable in. I found stuff about it in the System Settings, there's all kinds of options to make it have a different behaviour, which is great. However, none of them seemed to do what I want: Do nothing. So I thought I'd try assigning that key to a Hotkey (namely, the Yakuake hotkey. I love Yakuake~). It did work, but since the Caps Lock key wasn't disabled, it turns Caps Lock on when I open Yakuake, and turns it back off when I close it. So I thought I'd give it one of those alternate behavior in the System Settings, but then it stopped working as a Global Hotkey. How can I either: a) Disable it completely / b) Assign it as a global hotkey while turning off its capslocking behavior?
- Ninth, a while ago back home I had a SMB share mounted in my filesystem. I noticed that shutdown takes one or two extra minutes whenever that share is mounted, and it says weird messages about CIFS when shutting down. I noticed that holding down the power button at that point was safe, as all the drives were unmounted, but is there a way to disable this delay anyway?
- Tenth, I installed Flash using the flashplugin-installer package. It works for the most part, but sometimes it doesn't: the Flash area becomes completely gray, as well as all other Flash embeds in the following web pages. Reloading the page sometimes help, but most of the time I have to restart Firefox, which is annoying.
- Eleventh, I can't seem to download Google Gears back when I had Internet access. From what I remember, it had something to do with my platform type not being compatible. I can't really remember right now though
I thought Google was Linux-friendly? - Twelfth, this seems to be a silly bug and it doesn't bother me at all but I still noticed it. I have a nice OpenGL screensaver, and the unlock dialog is nicely displayed over it. Now, in the system settings -> About Me, there is a "At password prompt" box. The first and default option is "Show one star for each letter", which works fine, and as expected. The last option is "Show nothing", and it works fine as well. The second option is "Show three stars for each letter", and I thought I'd activate it for fun, just to see how long my password would look to someone else as I typed it. However, once enabled, whenever I type into the password field, I can notice a significant FPS drop for the OpenGL screensaver running besides it (goes from ~45 fps to ~8 fps). Stopping to type makes the fps go back to normal. It's weird.
- Thirteenth, is there any way (plasmoid?) to show the RAM and/or disk bandwidth usage in the taskbar, like Gnome's System Monitor widget? I only found the CPU usage and temperature. The disk monitor plasmoid only shows disk usage, which isn't really useful.
- Fourteenth, my laptop's built-in webcam works in Cheese and Kopete, but doesn't work in Flash or Skype. How can I make it work there? Since Cheese and Kopete can see it, why can't Skype and Flash? (I had to install the gnome-icon-theme package in order to get Cheese to work, otherwise Cheese crashes st startup while trying to load an nonexistent icon. gnome-icon-theme should be added to Cheese's dependencies, I guess. Installing gnome-icon-theme also had the positive side effect to make CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) get pretty icons, so it should be added there too.)
Please reply even if you don't have the answers to all of the problems mentioned above.
Thanks in advance!
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