AdrienCordonnier
Adresse électronique : MailTo(adrien_cordonnier AT PASDEPOURRIELS yahoo DOT fr)
About me
- I am a 24 years French engineering student currently living in Finland;
- I completely erased Windows from my hard in April 2001 to shift to GNU/Linux I had never used before. It has since been my only operating system.
- I spent some time to help the French "Détaxe" workgroup - and eventually got a refund from Dell after refusing Windows EULA.
Links
The French "Détaxe" workgroup is somehow similar to any Windows Refund Action. The main difference is it tries to have consumption laws applied on computer market as several French laws forbid explicitely to link the sale of hardware and software (but strangely enough, the government does not act) : http://www2.aful.org/sections/wikis/detaxe/GdTDetaxeEnglish
Kubuntu Breezy Review
I shifted from Mandriva to Kubuntu in June 2005. Mid September I tested Breezy. What I first enjoyed in Hoary was that it is nicely designed: cool default style and only great and usefull programs. The bad point was configuration, completely broken for network settings and not properly working for a lot of other things.
In Breezy, the configuration tools are quite good. It's clear that the development team has worked hard to fix this problem but on the other hand, the graphical interface seems to have been less polished. The small config bugs of Hoary have become small graphics bugs which is a lot easier to correct. Indeed, some are disappearing everyday when I updated my box on 17/9 
Here is the list of small issues I noticed:
- when opening several session, the sound driver can't be shared (I think this bug was not in Hoary);
- no icon for KThésaurus;
- most of KOffice icons are not using vector graphics, or don't have high resolution icon;
- buttons inside openoffice.org (v2) have the KDE look and feel but not the application icons;
- selected files have now their names written on a rounded corners box but the corner are not antialiased and so this improvement does not make the result looks better;
- amaroK has become AmaroK in French, I don't think names should be changed in translation (already in Hoary);
Kuser does not crash anymore but creating a new useable user account is still not possible: the new user does not belong to any useful group such as audio (already in Hoary);
- the calculator is a lot better, congratulation! but I'd like to have one able to compute equations such as the TI92;
- some System Settings modules are not yet translated;
- Connections in System Settings has no icon;
- the Network Settings does not reconize the platform, you have to choose it (I took Ubuntu) in a long list;
- in the Font Installer, the font size is left aligned and sorted in "alphabetic" figure order and not from small numbers to bigger ones;
- there are still some tiles as wallpapers, do some people really use such wallpapers? (not for disk space but for clarity in the list)
- a lot of Konqueror protocols haven't any explication - it would help people to use them as they are very convenient;
- most of the default fonts are quite ugly and they don't have any accent so it looks awful as soon as KSplash starts when the French localisation is set (the accentuated letters are replaced by a star) (the KSplach screen does not use fonts anymore but the default fonts remain ugly);
- by default, mp3 files can't be played! (even if I have 80% of my music in Ogg, it's very annoying);
- by default, divx, xvid, mpeg files can't be seen! Actually, I'm not sure that any movie file format can be used;
- the option to choose the charset encoding is not consistent between Konqueror and Kate (Affichage "Display?" in Konqueror, Outils "Tools" in Kate);
- the number of processes is simply huge -- more than 80 before starting any progs. It's less than in Hoary and not really ressources consuming but it is harder to look for processes which sometimes don't close properly. It is not consistent with the goal of only a small set of progs. And a lot of them are not useful (the hp* should be started only when installing a HP printer);
- on kubuntu loading logo in konqueror, one gear is white and so doesn't appear - it looks wobbly
- KSpread: when setting cell format, currency format shows always dollar even after choosing Euro, automatic currency does nothing instead of using locales.
Kile: utf8 encoding should be the default instead of latin1 in QuickStart as every files are utf8 encoded.
Kile: New File->impossible to select by clicking Ok - double clicking is mandatory (actually, it seems it is this kind of dialog box which has the problem: same problem when choosing the User Account icon)
same places can't be acceded except by shifting permanently to super user (sudo -s): "sudo cd myrep/" -> "sudo: cd: command not found"
- new Konqueror light profile is great; yet I don't understand why copying Firefox style with this default search bar: the URL bar can perfectly handled it by setting Google as default search engine. Just typing words in URL bar is a lot easier and faster.