Monday, September 24, 2007

KUbuntu Gutsy issues

Yesterday i updated to what will be KUbuntu 7.10 to 7.04. Here are the results:

* They still poppler patch kpdf even if the 3.5.7 packages for KUbuntu 7.04 did not, so expect that i still treat KUbuntu users as second class users when reporting kpdf bugs.

* There's a ¿kernel? bug that hogs the CPU https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/119315/

* My network configuration was lost, resulting in not being able to access the internet anymore, that is because now my second network interface is supported (that's good) and so what before was my eth0 is now eth1 and nothing worked (that's bad)

* They fixed a bug i reported about exit dialog accelerators not working correctly

* kdesu hangs randomly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144397

* XF86Mail key is hardcoded to a new mail message and you can't reassign it to something else like for example opening KMail https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144398

* They added a ugly user list to kdm that when disabling it results in an even uglier kdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/129309

All in all, my opinion is quite negative at the moment.

19 comments:

Luis Miguel GarcĂ­a said...

OpenSuse 10.3 is going to be released in two weeks. Perhaps you could try it. I'm happy with it...

Benoit Jacob said...

I'm another annoyed Kubuntu user, though I've not yet tried Gutsy. The KDE packages of ubuntu have always been moderately stable and deteriored by annoying patches. There are loooong-standing bugs that haven't been fixed since many versions, like the one where you launch an app as root (adept, systemsettings) and it never shows up; various adept crashes; and some systemsettings hardware configuration panels work so bad that they should not even have included them.

I'd considering OpenSuse too. Or plain slackware.

Jonathan Riddell said...

kdesu has been replaced with kdesudo which seems to be much more reliable and should fix the problems noted in the second comment. Albert's is the first problem I've heard with it and we'll look into it,

I'll add an alternate KDM theme without a user list, although I'm curious to know what the actual objection is here.

The Mail button is coded to kapp->invokeMailer() which should be configurable in the normal KDE way.

Patching kpdf to use poppler is because we don't have the staff to do security updates for 4 different forks of xpdf. some things may break and some things may get fixed but I havn't noticed many bug reports coming from it (as kpdf maintainer I understand that'll bring a different point of view).

Albert Astals Cid said...

@jonathan:

a) kdesu has not been replaced here, kdesudo was not installed. If kdesu is known to suck, kdesudo should be installed by default.

b) Actual objection is it looks ugly without the list, imho the theme should be inteligent enough to look not ugly when the list is not there, but maybe that's a kdm limitation

c) Good to know, but anyway hardcoding things is bad in my opinion, why instead of hardcoding not shipping a khotkeys definition?

d) What about people not beign able to print landscape pdf? Ok, that *seems* solved now, but was not working on 7.04

Albert Astals Cid said...

Forgot to say d) is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdegraphics/+bug/47649

Albert Astals Cid said...

ok a) might be my fault, i did not have kubuntu-desktop installed, but still, if kdesudo it's supposed to replace kdesu, kdebase package should pull kdesudo one.

Dan Nicholson said...

The wrongly named ethernet ports is actually easy to solve. There's a script run by udev that enumerates your cards by MAC address and then gives them a name according to what the kernel gave. Look for the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. You can just change the NAME= attribute to what you want. I.e., swap the current eth0 and eth1, and you'll get your old names back. This is restored across boots.

Anonymous said...

*buntu suck ...
Try OpenSUSE 10.3

Kevin Kofler said...

As far as I can tell, the userlist stuff is a KDM limitation, a theme designed for the userlist will always look ugly without it. We weren't able to do anything about that for Fedora 7 either. (We do, however, still include the FC6 FedoraDNA theme, which didn't use a userlist, as an alternative. For the upcoming Fedora 8, I'm not sure what the KDM theme selection will look like though.)

If you want to try another distribution, you may wish to give Fedora a try. (I recommend installing from the KDE-Live image.)

Anonymous said...

I liked SUSE alot but after Novell taking over it, shifting focus to GNOME, and eventually making an FUD agreement with Microsoft; I decided to switch to Kubuntu. Package management (being debian-based) is one thing i really liked in Kubuntu and hated so much in SUSE. Still you can very easily notice how much effort in spent spent in polishing and "usable-izing" Ubuntu (GNOME) and how very little goes to Kubuntu (yes despite Mark Shuttleworth himself supporting Kubuntu and all.) I'm now considering a switch from Ubuntu to a more true-to-KDE distro. Ark? Fedora? PC-BSD/DesktopBSD? or even tried to build KDE myself atop LFS

Anonymous said...

Jonathan (i suspect Riddel?), a reason not to have a user list is that I'm the only user on my machine, and the list is pretty useless.

auxsvr said...

The kdesu bug looks like the one I reported at Novell bugzilla, which has been fixed since 3 months ago and existed since the suse 9.3 days (I wonder how nobody ever reported this bug). It has been fixed upstream as well.

Anonymous said...

don't feed the novell monster: http://boycottnovell.com/2007/09/23/novells-identity-crisis-makes-linux-an-expensive-second-class-windows/

avoid suse, ignore spammers that advertise it.

It is in testing stage so why not actually report the bugs?

Anonymous said...

Don't feed the novell monster

sorry, forgot tags in the previous post.

Anonymous said...

I am not sure about gutsy, but in feisty there is a daemon that steals all extra keys and assign some reasonable actions to them.
when it was introduced I had all my extra keys assigned some actions that I sow reasonable, through.
So, this daemon bears the obvious name Kmilo, and It seems you could stop it and so you could manage it n regular way.

Anonymous said...

Albert, for the network interface name, see /etc/iftab

For the "non-appearing-root-launched-apps" issue, I've solved it many times by re-issuing launch command.

Despite this, I've to say I'm not happy with the way ubuntu project treats KDE. I'm only with Kubuntu because ubuntu has great popularity among new users, and I try to use my KDE knowledge to pick part of them for KDE.

Orestes.

Anonymous said...

orestes: Try the plain kde packages one day (like for example with Arch Linux (not KDEMOD)).
They are ugly, fscked up, and comes with a lot of useless apps and settings. I would say that the Kubuntu developers is doing a rather good job packaging it.

Anonymous said...

To put it right about KDEmod: It can be installed "vanilla", just take a look here (first entry): http://kdemod.ath.cx/faq.html

Anonymous said...

The poppler patch is such a bitch. The first chance I get I'll switch to a distro that is usable in the office.

Do those Kubuntu guys have any smidgen of a clue how important pdf printing is? Apparently not.

PDF is an open standard for crying out loud.