Since I started my new job last October, I’ve been using Linux almost exclusively on my laptop. I still boot to Vista every now and then, but mostly just to make sure it’s still working. My distro of choice is Kubuntu. I’ve got Intrepid Ibex 64-bit on my HP DV9543CL. My only real issues are the NVIDIA drivers, but that’s for another post.
One of the reasons I chose Kubuntu was it shipped with KDE 4.1 and I was excited to see how it was working once they got some of the kinks out. Most everything runs smoothly, but there’s the occasional odd thing.
1. Startup sound gets cut off. No matter what I fiddled with, I couldn’t figure it out.
2. Bluetooth support not working. I knew about this before I installed, and I tried to get it working with the gnome bluetooth tools. It’s not essential on this laptop, but I’d like to pair up my headset in case I want to make Skype calls.
3. Resume not working. Suspend/resume worked out of the box, though it stopped working once I upgraded the nvidia drivers as the ones that come with Intrepid had some issues. Once I upgraded to the beta drivers, resume failed. Nvidia has already acknowledged it’s their fault and they couldn’t get it into the 180.22 drivers, so for now I can use hibernate.
4. Even with the updated nvidia drivers, the tray icons got corrupted. I just learned to live with it.
5. Windows were a bit sluggish to resize, but again that’s chalked up to the nvidia drivers and something I can deal with.
6. I used to be able to set my numlock on (I have a full keyboard for a reason). In one of the updates, that function is gone in preferences. I hope they bring it back.
7. The panel was a little quirky. Took me a while to get it just the way I want, and sometimes it’d resize itself. Some of the applets wouldn’t vertically center. It wasn’t intuitive how to move the panel around (I usually place my panel at the top of the screen).
There were some other niggly-bits as well, but for the most part eveything was minor annoyances.
Last night I thought I’d give 4.2 RC1 a try. After a bit of coniving, I managed to update Kubuntu. My overall opinion is it’s a bit more polished, definitely a lot of work has gone into it. The startup sound now plays all the way through, the tray icons aren’t garbled (though some have gray boxes around them sometimes), it was easier to manipulate the panel, there’s more desktop effects, the task bar stacks up open windows now.
I tested suspend and resume again, just to see if it might work, but alas it’s still not resuming. I’ll wait for new nvidia drivers to test again. What I did find odd is there are now two power managers (or maybe there were two before, but I didn’t notice), one is the Guidance Power Manager and the other is PowerDevil. They look like the do the same thing but I don’t think I need them both running.
There’s a few more things I want to test out, but overall it’s starting to look like a good release.
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