Hi everyone, this is my first post here at the forum (first of many I believe) and I though it'd be interesting to post on how my first week of Kubuntu Jaunty went.
Now, notive that I'm a computer scineces student and open source lover, and even before installing Kubuntu on my laptop I used most open source software on my windows installation, and sometimes tried the dual-boot way (didn't work really because all my stuff was at the windows partition, so when I loggen on the other one I felt mostly... bored ^^"
Anyway! The first thing I had to do was to get the liveCD working, because my laptop has this silly legacy USB support that prevented the liveCD from even starting properly. It took me a couple of hours trying to find where was the problem, but after that I was good to go.
The instalation went smoothly, I selected the advanced option to make a 25Gb partition for windows afterwards (playing some games on LAN is still a fun thing, and some of them aren't fully supported by wine yet), and so it did. After everything, rebooted and I had a fresh-new installaton o/
I really loved the feel of the new version of KDE, things are really smooth and even with some efects I cannot see a drop on the general performance. But, of course, I found some problems/things that I didn't like XD
First, the network manager couldn't connect to my wireless password-protected router. I'm still working on that for now, but I believe I'll just install wicd to make things work.
Second, Kopete and Konqueror aren't really my thing, seeing that I already used a lot of firefox's plugins and alikes. Right now I'm using Pidgin and Firefox, and they seem very reliable as far as I tested.
Third, idk if it's a problem only with me, but Amarok2 still feels a little rough on some parts; it keeps skipping the sound when something is using heavily the processor, like when I minimize a window with some effect. I installed VLC and so far it's working good, but I haven't tested it enough.
Fourth, the greatest problem I had so far; I installed windows on the other small partition for some lan gaming, and the instalation was ok. BUT, after I installed it, I couldn't boot my Kubuntu anymore. Well, since it should be a simple problem I just searched the web for a solution, and everyone said that I should reinstall grub from the liveCD and afterwards put the windows boot entry manually there. But the thing is, somehow I could mount the Kubuntu partition, but when I sent grub commands related to it it just asnwered me with errors. Believe me, I sepnt 2 days trying every single command out there, even thought about installing LiLo and making everything from scratch, but Sunday I had an idea; I booted with a Ubuntu Jaunty liveCD, and using gparted I could switch the 'boot' marking from the windows partition to the Kubuntu one ^^
After that I still had to put windows at grub, but I probably was using an faulty syntax because when I downloaded the GUI editor for grub (kgrubeditor I guess) it worked flawlessly.
Today I'll try to fix the network manager somehow, wish me luck o/
And thanks for reading this whole block of text XD
Now, notive that I'm a computer scineces student and open source lover, and even before installing Kubuntu on my laptop I used most open source software on my windows installation, and sometimes tried the dual-boot way (didn't work really because all my stuff was at the windows partition, so when I loggen on the other one I felt mostly... bored ^^"
Anyway! The first thing I had to do was to get the liveCD working, because my laptop has this silly legacy USB support that prevented the liveCD from even starting properly. It took me a couple of hours trying to find where was the problem, but after that I was good to go.
The instalation went smoothly, I selected the advanced option to make a 25Gb partition for windows afterwards (playing some games on LAN is still a fun thing, and some of them aren't fully supported by wine yet), and so it did. After everything, rebooted and I had a fresh-new installaton o/
I really loved the feel of the new version of KDE, things are really smooth and even with some efects I cannot see a drop on the general performance. But, of course, I found some problems/things that I didn't like XD
First, the network manager couldn't connect to my wireless password-protected router. I'm still working on that for now, but I believe I'll just install wicd to make things work.
Second, Kopete and Konqueror aren't really my thing, seeing that I already used a lot of firefox's plugins and alikes. Right now I'm using Pidgin and Firefox, and they seem very reliable as far as I tested.
Third, idk if it's a problem only with me, but Amarok2 still feels a little rough on some parts; it keeps skipping the sound when something is using heavily the processor, like when I minimize a window with some effect. I installed VLC and so far it's working good, but I haven't tested it enough.
Fourth, the greatest problem I had so far; I installed windows on the other small partition for some lan gaming, and the instalation was ok. BUT, after I installed it, I couldn't boot my Kubuntu anymore. Well, since it should be a simple problem I just searched the web for a solution, and everyone said that I should reinstall grub from the liveCD and afterwards put the windows boot entry manually there. But the thing is, somehow I could mount the Kubuntu partition, but when I sent grub commands related to it it just asnwered me with errors. Believe me, I sepnt 2 days trying every single command out there, even thought about installing LiLo and making everything from scratch, but Sunday I had an idea; I booted with a Ubuntu Jaunty liveCD, and using gparted I could switch the 'boot' marking from the windows partition to the Kubuntu one ^^
After that I still had to put windows at grub, but I probably was using an faulty syntax because when I downloaded the GUI editor for grub (kgrubeditor I guess) it worked flawlessly.
Today I'll try to fix the network manager somehow, wish me luck o/
And thanks for reading this whole block of text XD
so I have no comment regarding the relative merits of Kopete and Pidgin, but I usually listen to music while I work so I can agree that Amarok2 is still a little rough, (If you find the amplifier frequency settings that they used to have in the previous Amarok, let me know.), but I have not experienced the difficulty you describe of skipping when the computer is under heavy load. Sound processing shouldn't require very many resources. If you can describe the problem in detail, perhaps someone here can help.
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