Matt Van Stone

Well, 2 nights ago I whacked my SUSE 10.2 install and tried installing OS x86 10.4.8. It looked like it was working, but stalled when trying to extract the files. I was able to format my SATA drive and everything. Since I do have an AMD CPU and an Nforce4 chipset it looks like there might be some problems getting it to install on a SATA drive out of the box. I’m downloading a different ISO to give it a try, but in the meantime I had to get something up and running. So last night I installed Kubuntu 7.10. I have had it downloaded since it was released but I didn’t want to take the time to install it.

First off I had the same two problems I always have with Linux. I had to install the nvidia-glx drivers and I had to remove the bluez packages so that my keyboard and mouse would work without having to reconnect the dongle every time I start up. This only took me about 10 minutes to do as opposed to the first time when it took me hours of research to figure out. Oh yeah, and usplash still doesnt work. By adding a better resolution to /etc/usplash.conf I was able to get the shutdown splash to display, but the boot splash is all distorted.

I must say, I am happy with how responsive it is. It does seem a little quicker than SUSE was. However, there is a lot of software that SUSE came with preinstalled that Kubuntu doesn’t. Firefox for example. It also seems to boot faster. From GRUB to KDM it’s about 24 seconds on my AMD 3700+. I was able to add my windows shares on my fileserver to the fstab file and they mount automatically when I boot. On SUSE I had to do sudo mount -a every time I booted up to get the shares to mount. That was a pain in the ass because if I started Amarok before running the mount command Amarok wouldnt be able to find my music on the server and would delete it all from the database. I would have to reindex my entire music folder again.

There is this issue with kdesu where sometimes it can’t find the current screen session for starting elevated applications. There is a bug report on this but it wasn’t fixed before Feisty was released. In that bug report kko has posted a fix that worked for me. It’s more of a workaround though because you have to do it every time it gets messed up.

I also had to install rdesktop for krdp to work. It’s strange that they had krdp installed, but not the required rdesktop package. Of course I also had to install MP3 support and all that jazz.

Those are the only things I can think of now that I had issues with. I think I am going to hold off on installing Beryl, or whatever it’s called now. I like how stable this stock install has been. Eventually I’d like to have a tri-boot system OS X, XP, and some KDE based linux, but I need to get an IDE drive that I can try OS X on before I attempt that.