From Kubuntu I would expect a System which works out of the box, includes all important KDE and 3rd Party applications and is of course based on debian.

Kubuntu 6.06 has been installed on my Laptop (IBM R51 with Wlan Chipset ipw2200). The Laptop had 2 Partitions filling up the whole space. These were the Windows XP and the rescue partitions. Booting from the Kubunut 6.06 DVD gave me a live system. My first idea was: “shit, I downloaded 3 GB of a useless live dvd”. It however turned out to be the usual installation. To have a live disk as well might be nice, but I would not consider it user friendly from the perspective of an installation process.

The installation itself was not difficult, but left me with hardly any options in the installation. This may be meant as an easy installation but is on the other hand missing many features. I would prefer the Suse Installation which is still easy, but allows the user to go into the details of the setup. For example I need to set up users with other numbers than 1000+ and need to know which user has which number.

After the the installation has finished one gets a KDE Desktop with 3 Icons in the Taskbar and no Icon on the Desktop. My first impression was that the Desktop had crashed, so that therefore no icon was shown, but there simply is none. I would say that the optimum is between none and too many icons. I miss the ‘workplace’ Icon of Suse on the desktop – and its functionality, because I could not find it elsewhere and ’sysinfo:/’ does not work in konqueror. The ‘access to workplace’ icon which I alos miss on Suse is missing here as well. It can be added though, but how shall a user now how and that it exists ?

Konqueror has no direct icon in the taskbar, but it can be found in the ’system-menu’. What surprised me about konqueror is the look. The interface is very much different from what I know. The lines in the detailed view have no shading which makes them more difficult to read (why has that been changed ?) and there only a few icons. The one that I miss most is the Icon/Detailed view. All this has been added to the menu instead.

Next thing I tried to do is to set up the network and do other settings. The network is a wlan with a local router. The Laptop has an ipw2200 Chipset. The drivers are no problem since the system connected to the wlan directly – but to the wrong one. Kubuntu simply searched for the only not secured network and connected to it, which definetly must not happen! My own network is password protected. Setting up the network with the Systemsettings progam of kubuntu failed miserably. iwconfig, ifconfig, route alle show reasonable values but the system is not online. Changing the Ascii password to the hex one was not possible because the kubuntu systemsettings dialog allows to set the password only once – definetly a severe bug.

The knetworkmanager was not installed, though I would expect this to be standard. It took me a public forum to find out that it is one the dvd and can be added with apt-get. Knetworkmanager only gave me a message ‘no networks available’ after started. An iwlist scan however showed me all available networks. The reason for this error was a completely wrong /etc/networking/interfaces file. But how shall somebody new to linux or as in my case new to a debian based system know this ? Sidenote: On Suse 10.1 this works out of the box.

When using the console under kubuntu I were surprised. There are apart from “ls=’ls –color=auto’” no alias defined. Suse defines about 20 by default which do really make sense. I missed for example “ll=ls -l” because I never type “ls -l”. I do not understand why these standard aliases are not defined.

Many further Settings could not be done because Kubuntu is simply lacking these features. For example settings of bootmanager, scanner, keyboard, any network (NIS, NFS, Samba), partitions, printer. The available printer setup is a frontend to cups, so that nothing can be set up because no cups user has been defined. The keyboard is set to nodeadkeys, but does not allow the opposite. Therefore somebody who want to write french letters will not want to use kubuntu. Can be set via console for sure. But that is the debian way and the reason I would not use debian.

Installation of software can be done with the ‘Add/Remove’ programm, which however allows only to install software from the CD/DVD and is therefore lacking most of the programs. The other program adept can handle more sources but has a really bad interface! I would prefer synaptic or smart. Especially the seperation of packages in categories is not implemented as far as I could see. So installation of programs is not easier because it is debian based, but harder because the frondends can not compete with those used with other distributions.

The last thing to mention, the boot process. Kubuntu has installed some entries for windows. In total there are 5 entries for 2 operating systems. And the most important thing – Windows can not be started with these settings. The other thing that made me unhappy about the bootprocess is the visual setup – because it is a non graphical boot setup which is definetly not the expected standard of todays distributions.

Kubuntu is still installed, still most hardware is not correct set up (because I do not know how) and I still find things that disappoint me. Probably the next time I really need a linux system on this laptop I will install Suse 10.1 again. That had worked on that laptop before – out of the box, which none of the issues mentioned here.

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