[GRLUG] 7.04

[Ben Rousch]

I have been running the beta of Kubuntu on two computers for a couple of
weeks. For the heck of it, I have tried Ubuntu on those same machines
for three days now.

Issues:
I ran into a driver bug with my Ralink Wifi card which has worked fine
since Warty, but I have an Atheros card that works well.

When I set Firefox as my default browser in Kubuntu, links in
Thunderbird still opened in Konqueror. There is a simple command to fix
this problem. (sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser)

Ubuntu (but not Kubuntu) has a nifty utility that pops up and offers to
install restricted video drivers. The drivers for my on-board Nvidia
card worked well. The drivers for my laptop's ATI mobility card borked
X. I simply moved /etc/X11/xorg.conf and apt-get install --reinstall gdm
and it went back to the free drivers.

I still have to make a link from /dev/TTYS0 to /dev/modem for KPPP to
work. It's been that way in every Kubuntu distro I've used.

Compviz is simple to enable in Gnome. However it did not work for me,
maybe because the restricted drivers don't work either. 

Those are literally the only problems I have had, which is an amazing
accomplishment for Ubuntu. I had been using Kubuntu since Breezy, but
Feisty's Gnome is quicker, more polished, and has more nifty tricks
(like the restricted drivers manager) than it's KDE. I will probably
stick with Gnome for a year or so and see how things look then.

Improvements:
The medibuntu repositories made installing all those illegal codecs a
snap.

Kaffeine played videos properly for the first time. Previously I had to
use Mplayer.

The built-in network manager actually works better than WLassistant for
connecting to wireless networks.

Both suspend and hibernate work out of the box on my Dell Inspiron 8500.

Evolution is almost as usable as Thunderbird for email, and its calendar
is much better than Lightening. Also it hasn't crashed in two days while
I move around 10,000 emails.

Overall impression: it's a beautiful thing.

On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 07:24 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
> Anyone here installed Ubuntu or Kubuntu 7.04?
> 
> Have any first impressions?
> 
>     -Bob
> 
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