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Kubuntu 7.10 Review.

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Hey All,

I have been a fan of (K)Ubuntu since ages. It goes back to the 5.x days.
I have been using the 6.06 LTS till now. I like the LTS concept and would definitely try to stick with that.
But Automatix had played havoc and I wanted to get rid of the media instability.

Alternate OS:
I like WinXP and am really not a fanatic person. WinXP + SP2 is one of the best OS I have ever seen and using various application is quite safe as long as you have a good firewall and a good AV running.

Back to Kubuntu. As I have said, my media portion of 6.06 was unstable and so I finally decided to use 7.10.

2 hours of bittorrent download and I am ready for the installation.

My 1st frustration: I choose manual partition during the installation. The installer shows swap and ext3 on some sda6 or something like that. I edit ext3 to have it as the mount point. Click Next. Now the installer says that the ext3 should have been formatted. Ok. I go back and check the format check box. Then Next, next. At step 6, the usual warning blah blah! Finish. After sometime I see installer crashing. I mean, it just vanishes!
WT #(*%&#?!
Tried this a couple of times. Same results.
On the 4th attempt, I actually delete the swap and the ext3 partitions, recreate them and then continue.
Now the installer worked.
I fail to understand why should I delete partitions and continue?! If the installer is told to use certain swap and certain mount point, what's its problem to just overwrite on the partitions I give?

Anyway, after more than an hour of installation, the system is up and running.
I have a celeron 1.5 GHz laptop with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD. So this time was acceptable to me.

Then comes the customisation. You can check the screenshot attached. You will get the picture for my custo.

Check the following link for the image...
http://amitrgholap.blogspot.com/2007/10/kubuntu-710-review.html

Next comes the media test.
Some mp3 I have. Amarok asked for the codec download and I was listening to the songs.
Then I tried a couple of wmvs. Kaffeine refused to play them.
Again the same frustration as I had during 6.06.
Using Adept, I install vlc. Now the wmvs play nicely in vlc as well as Kaffeine.

Now I want to password protect few of my files/folders.
I open the new Dolphin file manager. (Btw its nice and much better than konqueror.)
Archive and encrypt gave some error telling me to install one package, I forgot the name of the package.
Why is that package not part of the standard Kubuntu 7.10?!
I download and install it. Go through the motions of create key etc etc. And now my files are safe.
But why the hell is file protection through archive not simpler?! Why the key and other nonsense?!

I check the desktop search Strigi and its lightweight and nice. Many features are missing, but its still in a nascent stage. I am sure it would be better than that stupid KAT thing!

Next I want to surf and check mails.
Fire up konqueror and check my gmail. Good! Someone has sent me a message on facebook.
I click the link. Link opens in new tab. But I still get some stupid error which I dont remember.
I try orkut. Many of the functionalities like reply to a scrap etc are not working.

Anyway firefox is better with all the addons. And ff is on my laptop on a jiffy.

I remember that there are couple of pictures on my mobile which I want to mail to my friends.
I plug in the bt dongle and on the bt on my mobile.
Both laptop and mobile ask for confirmation of pin number and both the devices are paired.
I select few images and send to bluetooth. The deamon crashes!
This functionality was working fine on 6.06LTS.

Guys! What are you upto?! Why is 7.10 so crappy?!

Then I fire up kopete and try to login to msn, Kopete crashes!

This is not going nice!!

I go to launchpad and check the bugs. Multiple bugs on kopete crash are already opened.

So here I am with a
1. broken kopete.
2. broken bluetooth.

God knows what other things are broken!

What I gained was media stability.

So I am still at a loss with other major functions broken.

Its a bad deal for me!

Other irritating behaviour are:
- Screensaver didnt run even after 5 hours. I checked and found that nothing was selected by default.
- I line up my icons horizontally. Some copy paste and delete of few files on desktop resulted in files scattered on desktop.

I will not recommend 7.10 to anyone.
Better stick to 6.06 or WinXp.

Let 7.10.1 come. I hope it would be better.

Its said that the next release would be LTS. But with KDE4 due, I am not comfortable with a product having new environment.

So all in all a very bad taste.

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Try the main branch

Try Ubuntu 7.10, sudo apt-get kde-desktop . (vanilla desktop)

Works well over here.

Hi, The vanilla desktop is

Hi,

The vanilla desktop is not the default install.
Since (k)ubuntu team is customising the KDE, I - as an end user - expect certain things to work flawlessly.
Installing plain kde is not something that I would do is due to the reasons:
1. More bandwidth is wasted. - Yes, I wouldnt like to waste bw.
2. Clutter of menus (duplicate applications for same functionality).
3. HDD space wasted. - Yes, I have enough space. But still, a waste is a waste. And I personally dont like wastage.
4. The kubuntu feel is lost.
5. You told me to use plain kde. But when I suggest kubuntu7.10 to others, I dont see any reason to explain to them to go through all the hassles of installing plain kde.

No. Kubuntu 7.10 should work flawlessly.
Regression bugs are not allowed.

Thanks for the suggestion anyways.

~A.

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