Nice release

I installed Kubuntu on 1 laptop & 2 desktop home computer. The older one has only 256 Mb no graphic card & everything works fine, better, nicer & quicker than on M$ with all plasmoids, transparency, windows animations,.... I was really surprised when my wife tried to print something before I configured the printer, it just work directly "out of the box". Once all codecs selected in applet are installed, nothing else to do !

All my PC have many partitions (mostly used by Linux distros), the GRUB detection (before installation) take a very long time (more than 20 min) and is repeated for each new modification in partion table.

Some distro using GRUB do not use menu.lst as config file and are not detected at GRUB install.

#language en #format wiki

Introduction

• Add your feedback like this w/o the bold, and then use the @SIG@ at the end of your line, look at the first post for reference

• All serious issues should be still submitted as bugs!

Feedback

* Please post your feedback here -- claydoh 2009-10-20 18:22:06

* cblanquer 2010-01-04 14:50:30 I installed it in 3 desktops and 2 notebooks. Finally the notebooks got to W7 (missing working poulsbo drivers for GMA500) and U-Netbook Remix respectively. Great improvement but still missing (easy ways to deal with) key functionalities for a standard use:

1. dual screens functionality missing in KDE (see launchpad bug, it seems that on 9.10 it did not work and was pruned out in settings and in krandr) - I use again Windows when I need an extended desktop

2. no capture of analog input on TV cards (I have 2 ones which support DVB-T, analot TV & analog input from cameras or games) (*If anybody knows how to do it, I would than her/him *)

3. Setting up home or small business networks is much less intuitive than WXP or W7 and is a typical question of users to convince that I cannot answer
4. Often issues with sound at HDMI outputs (ATI card)
5. Often issue to capture sound from frontal microphone (both my desktops)

My feeling is still that a consolidation and improvement of such now common functionalities is the only way to compete with BUG nr1, especially now that W7 becomes again a serious competitor.

* Very good release. However sound works even worse than Jaunty with every non-KDE app. For example a single Flash video within Firefox while you're listening to music with Amarok is enough to make Firefox crash. There's a bug about it : https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/447844 . It stopped working when going from Intrepid to Jaunty, but now things get worse. Please, fix this bug ASAP because for the average user this make them think the whole system is crap while it rocks actually except for that single point !

• PulseAudio always causes problems me. The solution for me is uninstall it. -- usr

• Alternative solution I found : type command rm ~/.pulse* in a terminal, restart KDE, and everything works much better since when attempting to use PulseAudio Phonon falls back to ESD, which is old, hated but which works, at least !

• Remove the config file (~/.asoundconf) for asoundconf, it has ben depricated and affected my upgrade as well.

* Annoying issue for those of you using qemu with kqemu because of a multi-core CPU which does not have virtualization : kqemu support for qemu has been dropped, and this does not appear in release notes ! So performance falls miserably in that case.

* Nice release overall. Everything works, no crashes and no broken translations so far. Just some minor gripes: having "System Settings" in its own application sub-menu seems unnecessary, especially since they can also be found on the "Computer" tab. Additionally, I experienced the bug where trying to activate proprietary drivers does nothing (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jockey/+bug/357134). If you can get rid of some of the remaining bugs, it seems this could be a solid release (finally!). -- Naproxeno 2009-10-22 23:33:00

• Too many regressions, but a slight silver stripe at the horizon:
  • Good: finally KDE 4.3, which starts being usable
  • X.org keeps crashing (usually once a day) on random occasion using compositing and nvidia graphics driver (nv doesn't do the necessary resolution...)

  • dselect considers all packages as new that are not currently installed (LP #433680)

    • fixed in Debian 545366 as serious bug

  • display frequently flickers black picture for a fraction of a second)
  • there have not been working display drivers in *buntu for over a year now
  • compositing is increadibly slow - between clicking the border of a window and the resize following the mouse position, sometimes easily 5-6 seconds pass (idle system, Athlon64 X2 4200+), in particular when resizing konsole windows
  • pc speaker disabled by default for no comprehensible reason
  • no amarok1 - and yes, I once more tried Amarok2, it's still a no-go
  • notifications frequently hide somewhat way under the panel, moving them around makes them pop back - without hiding under the panel

  • -- kubuntu-rk 2009-10-23 10:08:46

* The first time I configured wifi I wrongly selected WEP instead of WPA. It then wasn't possible to change it. I mean, I could change it, but whatever I entered as passphrase would not work. I had to logoff and back on. This is from live CD. papaf

* The RC looks very promising and seems to be the most rock solid and usable (proably cause by KDE 4.3.2) release since the 8.04 release. Still the wireless and mobile broadband networking causes a lot of problems, even though the plasma-widget-networkmanagment have been polished a lot. For most releases since alpha 4 it (finally) works more reliable with e.g. hidden/none broadcasting wireless networks, but still struggles a lot with mobile broadband functionality (LP #334122). Finally the Canonical/Ubuntu decision to remove the restricted madwifi driver (ath_pci) and only serving the atheros kernel driver (ath5k) is fatal, as it keeps some notebooks and PCMCIA cards unusable on wifi networks (LP #276508), even though network management is usable. Keep on the good work guys, I really longs for the time where I can exchange 8.04 on my workhorse. -- happylinux

* Nice. Would be nice to have flash(64bit) as default on my 64bit system. But one thing, the settings for OpenOffice and Firefox are awfull. Some of the dialogs are unreadable. The app standard looks better. But over all Karmic Koala looks nice. -- Jakarta

* Does the netbook edition *really* have to be so large? I don't have any 800MB CDs lying around so I can't try it out yet! -- scottme

2009-10-24 18:31:30

* What I am still missing is the kind of (for a lack of a better word) "love" ubuntu receives. At least to me it seems that there are not as many improvements compared to the vanilla packages with kde as it is the case with gnome. Maybe most of it is just happening under the hood - which would be great, too - but I haven't noticed anything special that I might not find with a different distributor. -- florian-staudacher 2009-10-27 16:50:29

*Things that bother me: Jockey (Hardware Drivers) has never worked for me. Kpackage Kit has no categories view and doesn't show a list of all packages when none are searched. Nepomuk doesn't work with soprano even though openjdk is installed. Too many taskbar widgets, confusing new users. Kubuntu-Restricted-Extras includes sun's java. We don't need it. I don't need it. We have openjdk and icedtea.

* This release seems really good, but after trying few installs on few different machines two things really bother me:

• no matter what machine (x86 and amd64, 64 bit both on Intel and AMD cpu) I'm still wondering why is the installer so slow. It was much faster in other releases.
• compositing makes Skype and few other video apps unusable, because of the flickering. How can I talk with someone I'm not able to see? Suspending compositing fixes this problem, but it's only a workaround. This happened to me on ATI and Intel video chips using opensource drivers. However, I've never seen this on previous releases.

• also, when will proxy support work properly? I set proxy, but Kpackagekit still won't work through proxy. This is a problem, since konqueror has issues with my corporate proxy.It wouldn't be a problem, if only Firefox was included in the default install.-- WitoldKrakowski

* Fast and stable release! But there are strange hiccups when typing in konsole or in virtual Windows Vista under VirtualBox-3.0. During such a hiccup no keyboard input is possible and under VirtualBox-3.0 the GUI becomes unresponsive also. UPDATE: have found a bug report describing this problem (acer_wmi module related; does *not* apply to the VirtualBox hiccups): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi/+bug/443318 -- mdonkers

* Very good overall experience with KDE4.3, this release candidate can use all of my laptop's hardware, which is cool. I definitely love the desktop's look from KDE. Wrong part is that all bugs I noticed are still there: broken knetworkmanager, no sending via bluetooth, preview file in dolphin's context menu not working. I tried 9.10 in hope they were corrected, but they weren't. Not a big deal as I can work around these bugs by myself, but it's kind of like it's not finished yet. -- Jack H.

* Manual configuration of static IP finally works fine. It did not work in previous Kubuntu versions with KDE 4 (8.10, 9.04). -- orkanspec 2009-10-29 08:05:07