My Ubuntu Blog

Two days ago I installed Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta on my Acer Travelmate 5730. I often try KDE based distros hoping that I will eventually find something that doesn’t crash often.

Kubuntu 9.10 Beta Karmic Koala is improved in many ways. The new installer Bling is beautiful yet simple. Installation went smooth and finished with in 10 or 15 minutes. After the installation I logged in to a beautiful desktop. This beautiful desktop is KDE 4.3.1 which has many improvements. Well it is improved since the last time I used KDE 4. First of all it uses a new theme “Air” by default instead of Oxygen. Air looks better because it matches the over all look of KDE 4.

Kubuntu boots faster but on my computer it switches to text from boot screen which looked a little ugly. Once logged in, Kubuntu acts like MS Windows it starts loading applications in the taskbar and plays the start up music when everything is loaded. On my computer this sound appears 10 seconds after login. I think that the start up music should be played as soon as the Desktop appears. Otherwise it is a little distracting when I have already started working.

There is this one particularly wonderful improvement that I loved; Dolphin file browser’s file and folder previews, moving the mouse to a file displays a preview of the file in the information bar on the right. There is a scroll bar at the bottom of Dolphin window for zooming in and out. The animations are fantastic.

There are some very useful widgets added with Plasma desktop. I was particularly happy to see the social web applications for microblogging and facebook. However I was unable to use microblogging widget because there appeared a Configure.. button right in the middle of the widget and I was unable to find a way to make it disappear. But I am glad that KDE desktop is thinking about future by bringing the web to the desktop. I personally think that this is a wonderful approach.

In Kubuntu Karmic, OpenOffice feels more like home and so do some other GTK+ applications. Also there are many improvements in KDE applications. Like Amarok is using the latest release candidate, there is DBpedia an application to look for reference. I don’t know why I would use an application instead of web browser to look up at Wikipedia?

Overall I am very impressed with Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta. But I would like to warn you that there are two very annoying bugs in this beta version. First of all the new package manager KPackageKit does not work. So you will have to use apt from command line to install updates. Secondly you can not log out and log back in. I am also having problems at start up. During the start up KDM would hang without asking for login details. I can easily restart KDM but its really annoying. Hopefully these issues will get resolved with the final release.

The conclusion is that Kubuntu Karmic Koala is worth trying, it is improved and hopefully it will get better. So if you are like me, a person who wants to try KDE but often failed due to one reason or another, now is the time. Give it a try and file bug reports if you find any.

Just a few days ago the KDE 4.0 was announced. It seems that everyone was already excited about KDE 4.0. People using Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy can try KDE 4.0. Ubuntu Geek has an explained version of the same intstructions here. Tombuntu has ten tips for KDE 4.0 Beginners and patchshorts writes about 5 Things to hate about KDE 4.0.

I am not trying KDE 4.0 yet, I think it is still in development phase and since I am not an advanced KDE user I might find it difficult to use. Reading about KDE 4 at OpenSuse website and Kubuntu I feel that I might run into problem if I try to install it. DistroWatch weekly scares me further away in the featured story titled “Distributions and KDE 4:

KDE 4 is the start of something amazing and this is possibly the best definition of the current release – it’s here, it’s available, but it’s nowhere near ready for the prime time. It’s a decent start, though. So let’s give the KDE developers a round of applause for the courage to try something new and extraordinary, something that will eventually mature into a stable and reliable desktop environment we can all be proud to use on our computers.

Right now I have Kubuntu 7.10 and I am trying to get familiar with the K environment. I hope that KDE4 will be available with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron which is a long term support release. It will be much safer and enjoyable to try KDE 4.0 then or may be I should wait till the release of KDE 4.1.

I just read about the new version of KDE. I prefer Gnome, but there are so many KDE features that appeal me. Now it feels like KDE is getting improved. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu has announced that there next long term support version will be Gnome only, and Kubuntu will not be supported for long term. The reason behind the decission is the developer focus on KDE4. It is changing fast so it is not possible to offer long term support for it.

I often try to install KDE and try to develop a taste for it. But each time I end up frustrated with one thing or the other. Many of my friends are KDE fans and they think that Gnome is for grandmother and children. I want to discover why KDE is so great to them. Right now I think Gnome is the best, but I would be happier if the new KDE changes my opinion, as this will give me more choice and I will be enjoying different Desktop environments whenever I am bored with the one I am using at that time.

Firefox is great but since I visit several websites that Firefox is unable to render properly I have no choice but to find an alternative. I am starting to hate Firefox and forcing myself to love Konqueror and Galeon but still whenever I am using Firefox I feel like using a familiar application. Like when I want to create bookmark folders or search the web I know how to do it in Firefox quickly. I am still unable to get full control on either Konqueror or Galeon.

Galeon renders pages just as good as Firefox. But I don’t like its simplistic approach. I can not customize it as much as I can do with Firefox and Konqueror. So the main competition is between Firefox and Konqueror.

There are many features in Firefox that I miss in Konqueror:

• Konqueror is not among the Gmail supported browsers. Many web applications such as writely, gmail and others (that I haven’t discovered yet) do not work with Konqueror. It has a ‘change browser identification’ feature which changes the browser identity to anything you want. Like mozilla, Internet explorer, etc. I tried this feature with Gmail, the default CSS view loaded but page didn’t appear as it does in Firefox. mail snippets were running over timestamps and it didn’t look pretty.
• In Firefox I place items on the file menu bar I can not do this in Konqueror.
• Ctrl+F opens a find utility in both browsers. Firefox opens it at the bottom above the status bar which I find more usable than Konqueror’s popup.

Features where Konqueror beats Firefox:

• I thught that Firefox has made it incredibly easy to search the web but Konqueror has amazed me with its built in search shortcuts. One can extend firefox by installing extensions and adding search engines but Konqueror is clearly way a head.
• Though I can not place items on the file menu but Konqueror makes it easy to hide the file menu and then display it again.
• Clicking on feed icon in the status bar adds the feed for the page to Akregator default KDE news aggregator. I find it more usable than firefox’s live bookmarks. What I don’t like in both browsers is that they do not show the feed URL in a way so that a user can copy the url and paste it somewhere else manually.

A web browser is perhaps the most crucial software that an end user wants. If I am going to use Konqueror then it would be better for me to use Kubuntu since it integrates well into KDE. But what about the cool web 2.0 applications? I don’t want to miss anything so I just want to stay on the safe side. I am quite confused in this situation.