I’m now one week into intrepid ibex which is the latest offerings from ubuntu.
I have been running Debian 64 studio on my desktop for over a year now and just thought I would test the new kubuntu version as it bundled with KDE4 and the new kontact to go with it. Anyway I liked it that much I installed it right through the house apart from my server this is still running Debian and will do until it dies !!
Now this gave me the chance to try and various machines and also different installs.
I did a fresh install on my desktop computer – two fresh installs on the two asus 701’s we he have and I ran one upgrade on my sons machine. In the middle of all this I installed intrepid on a mates 701SD.
My Machine:
Install was 100% – fast install – very few questions. After the reboot it installed my nvidia drivers and one more reboot and it was finished loaded up ready to go! The feel of KDE 4 now is like ready to use for me! I tested around a month ago and hated it!! But now its feeling and looking very usable. I installed wine and cedega and chucked a few games at it which I noticed straight away its much snappier. Kontact connected straight to the kolab server.
Problems – Still a few KDE3 apps I.E. – amarok / smb4k / konversation / k3b
Now ive managed to get KDE 4 versions of smb4k and amarok and although they are testing they have been working fine for a week! Adept 3.0 is nice and I like having update manager back as its been broke in Debian for a while now.
And for some strange reason I had no screen savers installed? which was easy enough to do like so nothing really to moan about. My biggest problem which I will fix is getting desktop effects to work on two monitors, in desktop were you enable them it complained about missing xcomposite which I dug around google for and got the lines to add to my xorg.conf file, now after I make the changes and restart X I have desktop effects but my right monitor is loading a X session but the screen is just black and does nothing?
Device wise apart from that picked up the printer and usb scanner / firewire and all other hardware – I synced my palm treo no problem so happy days !!
The two laptops installed great – quite fast! all hardware great apart from wireless I just had to install the kernel from array.org and then its spot on! Now on my laptop I had to upgrade the memory from 512 to one gig as it was being a bit laggy – but now its great! desktop effects work spot on which is very handy!! The new network manager worked a treat!! Now one thing you have to change is the powermanager is its set to dynamic by default which can scale the chip down to 400MHz and it gets choppy as hell. Very happy with it on the asus 🙂
On my sons machine he had it running well with hardy so he just upgraded – the upgrade went smooth again it installed the nvidia drivers reboot and results are 100% his game play has accelerated he is very happy! 🙂
The 701SD is fine see my previous blogs for information on that. My mate is very happy 🙂
Verdict – yes its here its ready to kick ass!! Very polished install – desktop – eats vista alive.