So finally I decided to do a completely fresh install on my notebook, a Dell C640. If you are looking for a notebook which is good supported by Linux and FreeBSD, I can really recommend it, everything works out-of-the-box. also under FreeBSD, also the external VGA connector, useful when giving talks etc.
Ok, so what to install ?
It's intended to be easy to administer, so Slackware is out, although it is still my favourite distro for my desktop.
So, SUSE or kubuntu ? Both are good, but since I thought I should learn a bit more about Debian, I decided for kubuntu, downloaded the 6.10 Edgy Eft iso, burned it with k3b and rebooted the notebook.
The Edgy Eft CD booted without problems, then before starting the installation I set up the network manually (I don't have DHCP here, just simple static addresses) and then started the installation.
Not much to say, everything went smoothely without any issues and like 15 minutes later my new kubuntu booted :-)
Then I started adding packages: kdevelop, cmake, koffice, mc, joe, xfte and some more.
Until now I found three issues:
By default no additional package repository is enabled, so you have only a small selection of packages. This wouldn't be a problem, it it would be possible to enable the other repositories using the default package manager from the start menu. But this one provides only very limited features. I had to find out about adept_manager and start it from the command line "sudo adept_manager", then I was able to activate the other repos and add all the stuff I wanted.
How should a newbie ever find this ?
Or did I miss something obvious ?
Second issue: I plugged in a digital camera, the dialog popped up, asking me whether I wanted to open it in digikam or konqueror. I selected konqueror, it was mounted and displayed in konqy. Everything fine :-)
I tried a second time, selected "Upload to digikam" this time, digikam started, but complained "Can't read contents of /sda1". Obviously digikam was started with the URL media:/sda1, but doesn't seem to handle it correctly, but just uses the path from the URL, i.e "/sda1". This directory obviously doesn't exist, so it can't work.
Are there any known workarounds ?
Last issue: How can I put photos on my iPod under Linux ?
I can upload songs with the ipod-ioslave without problems, for images I found gpixpod. But it seems gpixpod doesn't like me.
If I point it to a wrong directory, it tells me things like "you have an ipod-none, this is not supported and will never be. Do you want to exit now ?" Hmm.
Ok, when pointing it to the mounted iPod it starts and seems to work. Except, when I want to add photos, the file dialog doesn't list any jpg files, just empty directories, so I can't actually select any photos to upload :-/
I guess it's some missing dependency, some python lib I guess. Any hints which one ?
Beside that, Edgy Eft makes a really good impression. Installation took all in all maybe 30 minutes, plus 1 or two hours installing the complete set of applications and transferring files from my old installation.
kubuntu now also has nice GUI utilities for package installation, user management and more, hibernating the notebook simply worked, and upstart also seems to work. So, very impressive ! :-)
Two things I like better in SUSE: they dropped arts, and KDE lives in /opt/kde3.
I'm really looking forward to kubuntu 7.04 :-)
Bye
Alex
Comments
Why I moved away from Edgy Eft
I used Edgy on three computers. Because of this bug I moved away from KUbuntu to OpenSUSE 10.2:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/68219
After more than 2 month the bug is still open. I think we all agree that OOo is a major app, as major as it gets (beside the kernel).
Well, of course there is the argument "move back to Dapper which is supposed to be stable". As there are no KDE4/Qt4/CMake 2.4.3/D-Bus 1.x-packages for dapper but are for Edgy I wanted to update. Now, after 3 weeks on SUSE I didn't have a single crash and still have the latest packages.
Sorry, not fixing such a serious and several times confirmed bug in a major package and not even answering my comment
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/68219/comments/9
is not acceptable to me, not even in a not-so-stable version as Edgy.
Something positive
Hey, that sounded very negative :-) Beside my no-go bug 68219 KUbuntu served me well on three computers for about 2 years. I really liked the distribution. It is really just this bug and if it doesn't happen to you I can really recommend KUbuntu to you ;-)
Well, you were asked to try
Well, you were asked to try out some new packages and you got a random crash that you can't now reproduce. I don't know what response you were expecting.
In order to track this down I'm just wondering if this is down to how OOo is packaged generally in Ubuntu, or whether it may be the KDE specific parts. The whole disabling of Klipper seems a bit suspicious. Does this happen within Gnome?
Seems rather dodgy, because I've compiled my own OOo with KDE with Gentoo on occasions, and it's been completely stable. And that's with my own CFLAGs etc. Sounds like something seriously amiss in Kubuntu somewhere.
I'm using OpenSuse now, mainly because of YaST, but whatever, getting wireless up and running is still murder and using NetworkManager and getting it to work is completely random at the moment.
I don't know if it crashes
I don't know if it crashes in GNOME and I don't care. I am using KDE and there it crashes. I was also not the only one for whom the packages crashed. I tried for 2 hours to plug gdb into OOo build ultimatly failed.
I also don't know why you bring in Gentoo's OOo. Here on SUSE OOo is also completly stable, great. But that doesn't improve the situation for the 10+ people which told me they have the same crashes.
Disabling Klipper made it crash 5x a day instead of 10x a day, ok. Now that is 4.9x to much, still.
Jonathan Riddell
> start it from the command line "sudo adept_manager"
adept manager is in the KMenu under System.