I’ve not been a big fan of Ubuntu in the past – and perhaps mainly from the aesthetics of it, as well as its reliance on Gnome – but I’ve neer felt I gave it a good test. Favoring KDE as I do, I loaded Kubuntu and gave it a run. I’m already a big fan of APT (through having used APT-RPM all these years) – and Kubuntu didn’t disappoint.
As I mentioned before, Kubuntu recognized everything on the system – bluetooth, PCMCIA, USB, wireless, ethernet, sound, video – it all worked.
Now after several weeks, how does it stack up?
I still don’t like the dpkg way of things: RPM is designed (and properly so, I say) to run unattended. If you use rpm to install, you don’t have to respond to any sort of install choices (there is no “partial install” – either it worked or it didn’t). APT is wonderful: dpkg is not – but that’s just my opinion.
I was surprised to see that, in Kubuntu at least, Synaptic seems to have given way to something called Adept. Not sure which I like better. I do know that I just despise the “dynamic search” that searches while you type. It slows everything down. I also don’t like the fact that I can’t sort things by groups – for instance, I’m always installing shells and languages of all sorts. Can’t I just look at those groups specifically?
I also found that with this hardware, the bluetooth adapter is always disabled (or seems to be) after hibernation. Using the key to re-enable it doesn’t help; the key is either intercepted or ignored by Linux. It’s not hard to make sure it is active after hibernation. First, make sure that the bluetooth is on at startup; if not, press the bluetooth button at the top. During the initial boot, the BIOS is in charge and it knows how to react to a press of this key – and the bluetooth light (blue) will come on.
If the bluetooth is not active after Kubuntu comes up entirely, it may be necessary to restart the bluetooth services:
/etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
/etc/init.d/bluetooth start
Don’t use bluetooth restart; it may be that more time is needed or something else. It may or may not be necessary to restart kbluetooth; if so, stop it from the task bar and run it from the System menu under the K menu.
With kbluetooth, you can tell if bluetooth is active or not: if the entire icon is gray (including the symbol) then there is no bluetooth adapter recognized. If the symbol is white, then there is an adapter present (though it may not be active).
There is also the Synaptics touchpad – but this is good stuff. The touchpad has capabilities that are not well-explained out there:
- Using a two-finger tap or a three-finger tap results in a right-button click and a middle-button click respectively (at least that’s what it looks like).
- Dragging your finger from top to bottom (or vice versa) on the extreme right side results in scrolling (similar to a mouse-wheel).
- Dragging your finger from left to right at the top may result in scrolling left-to-right (I couldn’t test this out).
- A double-tap and swipe is the equivalent of dragging an object – or at least, it is the equivalent of holding down the mouse button.
I found that both ksynaptics and touchfreeze (for configuring the Synaptics capabilities) are missing from repositories; only gsynaptics is present. There is good documentation from Ubuntu on how to set up a Synaptics driver; I recommend it.
The system as a whole does get hot – and, for whatever silly reason, has exhaust vents on the bottom (a silly idea in my opinion). No wonder people’s laps got hot. I have three film canisters that I set in a triangle to support the machine; it works beautifully. I plan to fill them with sand to keep them from moving around.
This combination of software and hardware is wonderful – the machine is nice, and the system is nice. Everything was integrated with a click: DVD playback, MP3 support, Flash support – it all came down with just a click. Everything is supported. I love this machine.
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