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Based upon what I've read about Kubuntu and KDE 4.x I have stayed away. In fact, I've stayed away from Ubuntu all together. 8.04, 8.04.1, 8.04.2 and 8.10 dissapointed me and they didn't live up to the  "promises made to me" by the 7.04 and 7.10 releases.

 Therefore I was reluctant to revisit Ubuntu, and the beta in particular.  No wonder I was surprised. Still only a beta, the experience was far better than the 8.x.x series. No hazzle whatsoever. 

It works - no hazzle.

I installed the no-mono-packages, and got virualbox directly from Sun.

No hazzle whatsoever. Hardware (Thinkpad T61/Nvida NVS 140) worked. All buttons, hibernation, suspend, HDAPS (HDD shockprotection) and TP_smapi (Battery charge control ) worked. Kernel, Xorg and driver obviously deserves the kudos.

In several distro I've had problems with my smartcard reader thus had to download and compile, not with 9.04.

 As I prefer to perform fresh installs and run dualboot, a beta is a kind of a fiest where I can fiddle around abit, sort out whats ok and what's not, I could not resist installing KDE 4.2.2. And it's great! 

Girly stuff.

In fact it worked well enough for me to send the Kubuntu Beta download link to a friend of mine - a woman (she prefers girl), nearly 50. She never installed a OS before - she just needed a LiveCD to confirm that her old HP/XP laptop was bricked. Never talked about installing it!

But she did! No assistance whatsoever! Now she wants Kubuntu on her production machine as well! She might have lost a bit of faith due to the persistent Broadcom &@#¤, but that I'll sort out for her.

 Now, I've got the final product and chose Kubuntu. It works just as fine as (and in some areas better than) OpenSuse 11.1, Arch 2.6.29 and Mandriva.  It needs 17 sec to boot according to bootchart, and I havent tuned anything. Not even removed any autostarters.  No problems with Ext4, but I still keep my docs and mediafiles on Ext3 partitions.

So, where's the catch?

I prefer a clean, single DE. That means no synaptic. I manage well with the KDE alternative, but it needs further develoment. Features missing. Not a disaster though. And not a showstopper.

Trouble is, I now have 2 primary production distros. Arch and Kubuntu.   

Last night I installed Kubuntu 9.04 RC on a 2Ghz, 512MB Shuttle machine with onboard graphics that landed in my lap a couple of weeks ago.

I tested Mint on the machine but had a problem with the login splash that disappeared after logout. Mint looked good but I found the desktop too quirky for my taste. Maybe my taste is quirky and Mint's desktop is fine?

I decided to give Kubuntu a shot because I like KDE4.  My last attempt at Kubuntu 8.10 was a disaster because KDE4 had numerous problems with the ATI card in my big machine.

The installation went smoothly, very smooth as a matter of fact. Minimal intervention is required but I did take the long route with partitioning as I was working with a brand new 120GB drive. The installation screens was intuitive and a room full of monkeys will be able to install this sucker. (They may get the timezone wrong)

Once installed everything worked perfectly. After the first boot (almost an hour later but I did not time the install) Kubuntu announced that there's updates ready and it was downloaded and installed in 15 minutes.

The interface is very nice. I will have to play some more but I'm impressed thus far.

My only gripe is that I had to go and get Firefox. And a windows user will have a difficult time with this. Once you figured out where the package manager is located and how it works, you are overwhelmed with 15 packages for Firefox to choose from.

Canonical may do themselves and new converts a huge favour and make the application acquisition process more intuitive for non linux geeks. I usually use apt and so will most of yous guys, but Kubuntu/Ubuntu is aimed at newbs(I think?)

The vast array of application available in the repositories and the "ease" of getting to them via the package manager is one of the biggest advantages Linux have over Windows.  Now just go and make the package manager flashy with lots of bling, bells and whistles and we have a winner.

I'm hugely impressed with Kubuntu 9.04 and will run a test and replace my families Windows box with this one and see how they accept it.

I have been out of town lately; so, not a whole lot has been accomplished on the BerkeleyLUG front in the last few weeks.  I hope to push things further along in the next few weeks.

I thought I’d kick things off a bit with a new post about an awesome (and fairly new) program/service for linux called Dropbox.

If you are like me, you have several computers that you use on a regular basis.  A desktop/server, a laptop, a netbook and a work computer.  It is annoying to have to manually sync files between them by email/flash-drive/ssh etc…  For example, I am often working on a paper at work and want to continue working on it home.  Or, I want my pictures to show up on all my computers when I get them off of my camera.  Same thing for my music, when I buy it (DRM free from AmazonMP3 or Emusic).  For the longest time, I was using rsync to satisfy my syncing needs.  Now, don’t get me wrong, rsync is awesome, but it is less than seemless.  At best I need to click an icon that launches a script to do the sync.  However, dropbox is seemless.  It comes as an extension to nautilus and creates a folder called “Dropbox” in your home directory.  Everything you put in that folder is automatically synced to your private webspace and your other computers.  It all happens in about 5 seconds.

For free, you can sync up to 2GB of of space, and, for a small monthly fee, (which I updated for after testing it for a few days) you can sync up to 50GB.  The program itself is opensource; you are paying for the webspace and bandwidth.

The way I use to sync most of my home director is to have most of my directories located in ~/Dropbox which I symlink to ~/ - the ones that aren’t symlinked are the ones I don’t want synced.  I recommend everyone check this out if you have multiple computers.  The program is awesome, the devs love linux/opensource and are open to suggestions and are extremely active.  A new test version hits the forums several times a week.