Kubuntu 9.10

Dear Kubuntu friends,
as I read several articles about Ubuntu and NBR 9.10 I think it's also time to share the experiences on Kubuntu 9.10:

I m running Kubuntu 9.10 on my AAO 110L with 8GB SSD and a 16 GB SD Card as mass storage. Installed it on EXT2 w/o swap. The system runs like a charm. Boot time (from pressing power button) is 50 seconds into desktop, 62 seconds to connect to Wifi. It is very quick and responsive, compositing is activated and running really smooth. On Screen Displays for volume and brighness are working. Sound, micro works.
I use Wicd for Network management and also activated acerhdf in modules.conf. Everything else is according to standard install. As browser I use chromium-browser which is really fast including flash support -> Youtube Flash HD Videos running smooth!

Both Cardreaders are hotswapable after the tip in this topic:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=18377

The following issues still need resolution:
- suspend sometimes freezes the system
- can't apply suspend to FN-F4 - META-F4 works (who knows how to apply to FN-F4?)
- in chromium browser flash player crashes sometimes

 

What about battery life? It's been so long since the last time I tried KDE4 but it seemed to much for our little machines. If I'm not wrong the latest version I tried was 4.2. Long time ago I read that there where plans for releasing a special version of KDE for netbooks and I've been waiting for that; that's the reason I've testing lighter desktops such as gnome, XFCE, Openbox LXDE and abandoned KDE :roll:

 

I'm running a 6cell with 5200 mAh, battery life is 5 - 5,5 hrs. Aprox. the same what I had with Xubuntu 9.04

 

Hello,

Did you install Kubuntu 9.10 using the lucid image? I don't know why but after downloading the image and dumping it "dd" at a USB disk. I was not able to boot it though... no matter what. How did you installed it exactly?

Regards

 

The Lucid Lynx Image is the alpha of Kubuntu 10.4. Haven't tried it yet.

Downloaded the desktop version of 9.10, copied it onto USB stick using UNetbootin. From my perspective the easiest tool available.

 

I have Kubuntu 9.10 running well, just installed this morning. Had some trouble with sound working on youtube, etc. Fiddled and fiddled and googled, no luck. I went into Kmix, toggled on all the channels, upped all the slide bars to the top, including MIc, and suddenly sound seemed to work. Skype worked good once I raised the Mic Boost bar. Sometimes sound seems to delay a bit before it comes on, then seems to work OK. Glxgears is over 1000 fps with no tweaking! Boot times are about the same as listed above.

I didn't expect KDE to run this nice on my 8g ssd drive with 512 ram.

Sanger.

 

How much memory is in use immediately on boot up? I have 1.5Gb in my aao at the moment but I am thinking of putting it back to 512 to save power.

I was thinking of trying xubuntu on my aao but might try kubuntu instead. I had thought it was probably a bit heavy for it.

I have installed kubuntu karmic on my desktop. I was a long term kde user but had moved to gnome since 8.10/9.04 to escape the initial kde4 mess. I like karmic kubuntu but I am having problems with my old graphics card and the oss drivers.

As a result of trying to sort out that problem I have discovered that running openbox instead of kwin works very well and saves ram as well as being quicker. Doesn't have the eye candy but worth looking at if you need extra performance.

 

Also, are either of you running the kubuntu netbook version or just the standard kubuntu?

 

wow, this is major. You got KDE4 running on an AOA110? The same AOA110 that couldn't run standard ubuntu 9.04 because the 8gb ssd was so slow it freezed 1minute out of 5minutes usage? Not only that but you have HD videos on youtube like say this one I chose randomly as a benchmark that I can't even run on my main laptop?

Do you use the 16gb to mount only the home folder?

 

Well, I assume Kubunt 9.10 has KDE4 on the default install. When I dragged a window around it would become transparent during the drag if that is any indication. I ended up borking my install fiddling around with stuff like swap file settings, etc. I had WICD installed and working nicely too. During the re-intall my 8g hardrive gave up the ghost. Doesn't even show up at all. I have installed many flavors of Linux over this last couple of months. Had I stuck with the Linpus install, the hard drive probably would of lasted forever.

YouTube videos woked very well, full screen etc using Kubuntu. I wouldn't say that youtube HD worked flawless, but they played better than anything so far, including linpus. They would chug along if Kpowersave had the cpu throttled down while on battery power though.

So I ordered a 16g ssd replacement drive and a Gig of ram. Then I will be putting Kubuntu back on again. I hope I don't break anything when I take her apart for the new hardware!

Oh, I have been using Kubuntu desktop install, not the netbook version.

Sanger.

 

I have also changed from OpenSUSE 11.1 to Kubuntu Karmic on my AAO 110L with 512MB Ram and 8GByte SSD.
The old Suse was still with KDE3.5.10 and without desktop effects.
Installation of Karmic went smoothly on ext2 without swap (which might have been a mistake!). All hardware works like a charm even the right hand card slot with the trick mentioned above. I even installed vmware player 3.0 to keep an old WinNT installation running.
Performance of Kubuntu Karmic is excellent as long as you do not overstress RAM usage. GLXGEARS shows around 1200 fps.
One big resource drainer is amarok 2.2.1. When it is running it slows down the system a lot. Also of course vmware player stresses the resources up to the max.
Comparing to my old suse installation video performance is dramatically improved now but memory handling was better on suse. Karmic tends to slow down dramatically or even restart KDE if you hit its memory limits. So if I had to reinstall I would definitely try with a swap partition.
One problem is still left: when connecting a digital camera digikam refuses to show thumbnails of the pics in the camera. But this is not only on my AAO but also on my other Kubuntu Karmic installation on a desktop.

 

I'm positively surprised to see that you also have good results with only 512 MB Ram. I upgraded to 1,5 GB and as Ram is really cheap nowadays this is the most worthwhile upgrade I can recommend.
With the 1.5 GB there is also no need for the swap. I never ran out of memory so far. And, remember, the SSD performance of our little toys is not really good. To access the swap noticeably slows down the whole system performance...

 

Well, I got the new 16g ssd drive and a Gig of ram installed. I stripped a couple of screw heads on the MB and had a difficult time on the install, but in the end all was well.

I used the Macles backup/restore method and got an old dual boot image put back on the new HD, then did a new install of Kubuntu. After a full update, I installed skype and a few other odds and end, and my machine is running better than ever. I did an ext2 install with no swap, and all seems well. Very happy so far. I am sticking with Kubuntu for a good while this time. Tired of trying every Distro out there LOL!

Sanger.

 

@Sanger,
what SSD did you use? I'm considering buying a Super Talent with 16 or 32 GB.

 

Nudnik_de , I bought a 16g supertalent SSD from Ebay. E-whiz shipped it to me in just a couple of days, they were in San Jose and I was in Sacramento, ca. They also had 32g SSD supertalent drives. They had a real good 3 day price on the 16g drive , so I bought it. I also bought a gig of supertalent ram from them, since I was taking the thing apart anyway. Been tweaking and playing with it for 4 or 5 days and everything seems to work. I wouldn't say the new drive is much faster than the old 8g intel, but there seems to be less hiccups when typing text in Firefox, etc. Winxp seems to boot a little faster and be a little snapier with this drive.

The HD went right in. You have to kind of fiddle with the existing HD cable to get it off the old drive, not the MB or HD connections, but you have to kind of thread the cable out of this block with a slot on top of the 8g drive. Not hard to do really. The cable went right on the new drive and was immediately recognized by the bios.

As a side note, I was able to still use the Macles back up method using an 8G usb drive which was able to hold my dual boot image from my new 16G SSD drive. I do not have a lot of data on the machine, I think the Macles backup image was a little over 5 gig for the dual boot winxp/kubuntu install I have. It takes maybe 10-12 minutes to restore from the USB stick should something get corrupt in Kubuntu. That is much better that a complet re-install and update, which takes hours LOL!

Sanger.

 

I'm seeing the same boot time (~60 seconds) and battery life (5-6 hours with 6-cell 5200 mAh battery) with a 160gb HDD and desktop Ubuntu 9.04, but without any of the issues that I encountered with 9.10. Although I have defined swap space, as soon as the 1gb of real RAM is used up, paging makes performance fall off a cliff. Closing the lid without first using suspend seems to chew up memory, especially after a prolonged time.

 

Very impressed with distro.

Minor issues I had:

1. Wifi wouldn't work initially, but after a cabled update it was fine

2. Needed to manually set dpi to 96

Code:

sudo kate /etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup

and add

Code:

xrandr --dpi 96

at the top. Restart, then open a terminal and type

Code:

xdpyinfo

and you should see towards the top "resolution: 96x96 dots per inch"

3. I then found to get time/date the right size on the toolbar needed to System Settings > Appearance > Fonts > Small to font size 7. Personally, found setting everything else to font size 8 worked well.

 

I have tried kubuntu. It works but is quite heavy on ram usage. I find that kde4 still feels half done. It is almost great but just isn't quite there yet. Not sure whether I will keep it yet or install ubuntu which seems a bit more polished on the aao although I am not a fan of gnome and generally prefer kde.

 

@ bailout:
did you try OpenSUSE 11.2? Their kde 4 is a lot more polished and uptodate.

 

Just as a Heads Up: Upgraded successfully to KDE 4.4 RC1. Everything runs great! I had some occasional booting issues with the old version. These have disappeared as well...

KDE 4.4 also solves all the other minor issues I have reported in the initial post:

FN-F4 (suspend) and FN-F5 (VGA toggle) can now be accessed directly via the keyboard configuration dialogue.
Both do not work out of the box but I used some scripts to get these working:

FN-F4:
create the following script and match it to the keyboard shortcut:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
#kpowerdevil is not responding to XF86Sleep or XF85Standby
#try sending a dbus command to PowerManagment
dbus-send --print-reply --dest='org.freedesktop.PowerManagement' /org/freedesktop/PowerManagement org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.Suspend

FN-F5:
see this post:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=12288&p=85646&hilit=external+monitor#p85646

The occasional system freezes during suspend were caused when the SD card was mounted. I solved it with a script that automatically unmounts the sd card before suspend. There was another post in this forum regarding this issue but the initial solution did not solve the problem for me completely:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=18335&p=106399&hilit=sd+card+suspend#p106399

Nudnik