New Laptop; Kubuntu Review

Laptop

For Black Friday I got an early Christmas present, a Toshiba Satellite. Its innards are all Intel, so everything works fine in Linux. Its nice coming from the hassle and incomplete support of ndiswrapper to the open source drivers that Intel apparently helps support.

Kubuntu

My main desktop is Gentoo and has been for the past 4 years. I'm rather happy with it: I know how it all works, its continuously updated, has good support for commercial software. However this laptop has only 512 of RAM (rather painful for compiling) and I had heard that Kubuntu has good laptop support.



And indeed thats pretty much the case. All of my hardware was recognized: the dual-core, the wireless, the Intel graphics chip and power saving and status features are all working without any configuration. It was the easiest install I've ever done. And I'm happy with the result too, Kubuntu does a good job of putting everything together. The complaints I'm about to go into don't take away too much from this fact.



The problem with Kubuntu and Ubuntu are their defaults for the repos. I'm pretty sure the fact that the default repos get better support then the 'universe' 'multiverse' etc. repos is something that is only understood by only a few. And apparently thats the entire reason for not having them on by default. So when I wanted to install kdevelop, I was a little puzzled at first. Gentoo currently shines in this area, I've only ever had to use an "overlay" if I wanted to install unreleased software.



The other issue I've had is with wireless network configuration (at least its not wireless driver configuration!) If there's a Kubuntu equivalent to Gentoo's /etc/conf.d/wireless I haven't found it. Right now wireless works if I run wlassistant (a GUI interface to configure the wireless) try to connect, it fails, and then I restart /etc/init.d/networking. That doesn't make too much sense, I know.



In general their startup scripts seem to be all pretty unorganized. All written in plain /bin/sh and with no clear design (like instead of a general dependency system, there are scripts that are run before and after specifically network goes up and down). Gentoo's startup and configuration system is hardly revolutionary which I suppose makes Kubuntu's antiquated system that much more frustrating.

x2x

x2x is a cool little utility. It lets you control two computers easily with one mouse/keyboard. I made an icon in my quick launch to the following:

ssh -X ian@`kdialog --inputbox 'Connect with what host?' some.host` "x2x -west -from :0."

And with that I can just set my laptop down and start using my desktop's mouse and keyboard to control both.

Kirksville

I'm returning to Kirksville, Missouri tomorrow. Its felt like a long time even though it was only a half week: it will be good to be back.