Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (Alpha 4) Overview & Screenshots

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.


The new Karmic currently comes with Linux kernel 2.6.31, KDE 4.3, Amarok 2.1.1 as the audio player, Dragon Player as the default video player. In one of my previous articles I pointed out some of the new features in KDE 4.3, some of which are implicitly included in Karmic, like the new Plasma look, called Air, or the new KRunner.

Konqueror is a hell of a browser, with countless features and ease of use for those who are already used to it. These are not all, but it comes with web shortcuts, enabled AdBlock filters, profiles, plugins, shortcut to various web page translations, user agent switching and so on. There was a time when Konqueror was very unstable, but now I encountered no crashes, with Flash enabled. On the other hand it was always mature regarding features and usability, since the KDE3 days. YouTube works fine also, but I had to manually install the Flash plugin, although package flashplugin-nonfree was already installed.



Compared to the current stable Kubuntu, this one seems to be more responsive and faster, although resizing windows with desktop effects enabled can still be slow, but I tested this on my older GeForce 7600. Compositing works very well in KDE 4.3, at least that was my experience with it, and all the KDE applications interact good enough, but Firefox or GTK applications for example may be a little choppy (for example when using the Magic Lamp desktop effect). Of course, this is an alpha.


Some windows still have simple size issues, they are either too small or too big and need resizing.

One thing that bothers me at Konsole is that it still doesn't include a right-click context menu to close separate tabs, instead this functionality is available using Ctrl+Shift+W.


For some reason the Save as dialogue in KSnapshot won't show certain files, although their extension is the same selected in the dialogue. I noticed this happens only when saving on partitions mounted manually. This seems to happen at random.

Amarok 2.1.1

Since this is an alpha, there are still bugs and most of them come in applications which are not included in KDE, for example in Amarok 2. Also, the sound system doesn't seem to work, although this is a KDE problem I think, because on Ubuntu it does work.

Overall, this looks promising. The developers will have enough time to polish it until October, and KDE 4.3 really behaves very nice, not to mention the look.

Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Overview & Screenshots

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many improvements and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method. Free CDs through the ShipIt service can be also ordered, which is another way from which users can benefit of Ubuntu and spread it.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, one of the oldest distributions out there, well-known for its highly stable releases, but it delivers the latest versions of applications with each release and offers a more polished desktop. Many other projects were born based on Ubuntu, including Kubuntu (which is practically Ubuntu using KDE instead of GNOME), Edubuntu (for educational purposes), or Xubuntu (using the Xfce desktop environment).

In this article I'll overview Kubuntu 9.04, which comes with KDE 4.2.2, bleeding-edge software like OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 and Amarok 2.0.2.

Typical Kubuntu 9.04 desktop with default wallpaper

First of all, Kubuntu was always known as Ubuntu's little brother, since it was based on KDE and opinions were always different regarding its stability. Some say Kubuntu was always a buggy distribution, and probably the worst KDE-based distribution out there, while for others it works very well. Since Kubuntu shares the same repositories with Ubuntu and the KDE packages come from Debian Sid (the unstable Debian repositories), this can be understandable, especially that usually the Ubuntu community focuses on GNOME.

Although I already had Kubuntu 9.04 Beta installed on a separate partition, I decided to download the final release and install it on a clean partition instead of apt-get dist-upgrading. Anyway, here's what the brand, new and shiny Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has to offer...

I took the following screenshots at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 180.29 driver on a GeForce FX 7600GS graphics card.

As usual, I noticed incompatibilities between KDE's desktop settings and nVIDIA driver, but they seem to go away after using nvidia-settings utility to set resolution and save settings to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I made a full review of Amarok 2.0.2 on Kubuntu here, and although I found it buggy and lacking features, 2.1 promises great improvements.

Amarok 2.0.2 - currently pretty buggy

There was a problem after ticking the 'Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the xserver' check box in System Settings' Display tab (it didn't restart the X Server), but it went away after setting the resolution through the nvidia-settings tool.

System Settings

Kontact, Kopete and KTorrent

Konqueror

KMenu

Dragon Player

I could notice Dolphin will eat 100% CPU and practically freezes the system when moving the mouse over a Quick Time .MOV file (I guess that's because codecs are not installed, but nevertheless, this should be fixed).

Dolphin

I liked to see KDE 4.2 is much faster than how it was in Kubuntu 8.10. Great transparency effects, wobbly windows, animated minimise/maximise of windows are just a few of the wonderful desktop effects KDE has to offer.

Overall, Kubuntu 9.04 seemed, at least to me, buggy as usual. The pppoeconf utility does not seem to work, despite the fact that the Internet connection works flawless in Debian; (update: this proved to be actually a problem with the ISP),there are still some problems with fonts when changing resolution (this is probably a KDE issue, since it's been there for years, KDE3 too). But still, with a little tweaking, Jaunty can offer a good KDE 4.2 experience and bleeding-edge applications.

Kubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour

In less than a week the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex should be out.

I took these screenshots using a Kubuntu Intrepid Beta installation after performing a full dist-upgrade, at 1280x1024, with the nVIDIA 173 driver installed. I left all the settings in applications default, but I had to make fonts smaller and resize windows (in Konqueror for example), because they didn't look very well as default. The default theme used is Oxygen.

Moving a window around

Konqueror

Desktop widgets

Dolphin

Dragon Player

KTorrent

Kopete

Konversation

Konsole

K3b - KDE4 port not available yet

Desktop Settings

Good ol' Amarok

About KDE4

Impressions
I think KDE 4.1.2 looks just awesome, and so does Kubuntu. The only problem is that it's not very stable, and there is less than a week until it should be released as a new stable, 18-month supported distribution. Konqueror crashes very often with segmentation fault errors, and gives no feedback in return. It just disappears, so I had to run it from Konsole in order to see the output.

The main problem I encountered was that most of the windows and widgets must be resized, and the resolution Kubuntu uses by default is the maximum supported by my Philips 107P5 CRT monitor, and that's 1920x1440. For this resolution, default fonts are very big.

Here's how the Display tab in System Settings looks like:


You'll have to actually scroll in order to see the drop-down list to select the frequency. I think this is the kind of work which a distribution must fix and polish, not necessarily the KDE team. Of course, Kubuntu never does these things anymore, so I don't even expect it to.

This screenshot also shows the available resolutions, so pick any colour you like:


As you can see, the font size is too big. It's true, after changing the font sizes it looks well, but this should have been done by default.

I encountered artifacts everywhere, but I'm not sure if it's because of the nVIDIA driver or KDE, and I never had the occasion to test KDE 4 with another graphics card. Scrolling and window resizing is also extremely slow.

Here's another addition from the Kubuntu developers, but I guess it never matters that you can see only the upper half of the text 'your password' (and that is after I switched text size from 9 to 7):


I recommend Kubuntu Intrepid if you want eye-candy and bleeding edge software, but I strongly advise against using it for a stable, productive system. I think you'd be better off with Ubuntu or Debian + KDE 3.5.9 for that.

Overall, I found this beta looking very good with a little tweaking, and since I'm a KDE fan, I'm happy to see how good KDE 4.1 can look. I think all the new development which has been put into KDE 4.x, all the eye-candy, beauty, transparency effects, artwork, and a completely new approach really makes up a powerful, innovative desktop environment, and I hope for improvements over time and even more usability where possible.

Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour

Although I'm a KDE fan, after the last Kubuntu release (8.04 - LTS) I was a little disappointed, so I decided to try Ubuntu 8.10, which is going to be the next release of this wonderful distribution, codenamed 'Intrepid Ibex'. Ubuntu is definitely the most popular Linux distribution, also occupying the top position at page hits on Distrowatch.com for almost 4 years now.

Below are screenshots I took after I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Beta on a separate partition of 10 GB, on an my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz PC with 1 GB DDRAM2. I took all the screenshots leaving default appearance and settings in applications, including the wallpaper, after I installed the nVIDIA restricted drivers and enabled Normal effects in System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Resolution is 1280x1024. I also performed a full apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and restarted the computer before taking the screenshots, so the installation is more recent than the actual beta release.

Intrepid Ibex comes with GNOME 2.24, Firefox 3.0.3 and OpenOffice.org 2.4.1. The installed system occupies 2.4 GB after dist-upgrade and apt-get clean.

Default desktop

Rhythmbox music player

Totem movie player

Nautilus file manager

OpenOffice.org Writer word processor

Tomboy notes-taking application

GNOME Terminal shell-like application

Firefox web browser

Ubuntu Help Center

Pidgin IM and IRC client

Appearance properties

Brasero CD/DVD burner

Character Map

Visual effects

I can't say it behaves very well until enabling the desktop effects, below is a screenshot showing artefacts while fetching graphically the nVIDIA driver:


I found a bug here and there, especially regarding artefacts at drawing window decorations, but the final version did not arrive yet so no comments regarding those. I just hope for a good release.