JUN
11
2011

Linux (and Windows) on a new HP Pavilion laptop

I got a HP Pavilion g6 for my birthday -- this must be the first time I have a personal laptop, all my previous ones having been bought by KDAB (or by IBM as KDE sponsoring, for the very first one).

Main purpose: Windows music software. But also reading KDE email of course. So I installed linux (openSUSE, to try it out for the first time).

First finding: creating partitions in Windows 7 must be done with care: if you have 4 physical partitions, trying to create a 5th partition will NOT switch one of them to logical as it should, instead it converts the whole partition table to 'dynamic', which is apparently not supported by grub nor linux. Thank you Microsoft for not using standard partition tables, and for not providing the 'convert back to basic partition table' feature. Fortunately, others solved that problem: downloading and using 'EASEUS Partition Master' enabled me to undo this and create logical partitions.

Second surprise: copying 13000 files (4 GB) from a DVD to the hard-disk is extremely slow in Windows 7: 10 hours! Well, estimated. I lost patience after 2 hours and rebooted. Doing the same operation on Linux: 7 minutes. Amazing.

KDE 4 is nicely integrated in OpenSUSE, and as a user I like the large coverage of functionality offered by YaST2. Setting up KDE from scratch reminded me that a 'disable all sounds' button is really missing in the 'configure notifications' dialog box, doing it by hand for every system event is rather tedious :-)
We also have some work to do on making network printer detection as automated as Windows does.

Comments

"Setting up KDE from scratch reminded me that a 'disable all sounds' button is really missing in the 'configure notifications' dialog box, doing it by hand for every system event is rather tedious :-)"

God yes! been bugging me since 4.0. Had also forgot it since it was quite a while since I set my KDE config up.

Elvis


By elvstone at Sat, 06/11/2011 - 10:31

God yes! been bugging me since 4.0. Had also forgot it since it was quite a while since I set my KDE config up.

You get the same effect by disabling audio output.

Notifications -> Player settings -> No audio output.

Not completely intuitive though. I think I also disabled all the sounds one by one last time as well.


By Allan Sandfeld at Sun, 06/19/2011 - 10:45

Network printer detection is fully automated, at least on Kubuntu. I thought this had been merged into KDE ages ago. In fact, my girlfriend was surprised at how easy it was to install our HP LaserJet 2600n on Kubuntu, way easier and faster (15 seconds) than on Windows.

What printer do you have?


By Pau Garcia i Quiles at Sat, 06/11/2011 - 11:39

Yeah, it should be automatic, but it's not done by KDE anymore, it's up to the underlying print system to take care of. The OpenPrinting guys have spent 10 years working on that stuff and I have no intention of trying to understand or replicate it. :-) That said, I suspect Yast may not use the OpenPrinting stuff (system-config-printer) as they have their own Yast module for printer config so it may not be as smart.

John.


By odysseus at Sat, 06/11/2011 - 19:02

There is a 3 years old bug report for it: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157272 Who is annoyed enough to solve it? :)
Go David for openSuse, go!


By amantia at Tue, 06/14/2011 - 06:29