Occasional Thoughts

Just tried to upgrade to Kubuntu Jaunty from Intrepid and recognized that my 3 years old notebook is too old to be worth for ATI to be supported.

Jaunty comes with a new XServer and needs the FGLRX 9.4 drivers from ATI. However ATI stopped support for several older cards as discussed in the Ubuntu Forums. There are even some never cards affected, so in case you wish to upgrade, first make sure that FGLRX 9.4 supports your chipset.

Unfortunately the Open Source radeon driver is - in my case - way too instable to work with. I had complete X server crashes after just a couple of minutes each time I've booted.

After a long painful time I finally got my Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 running for streaming on my Ubuntu Intrepid server. As streaming software I used Motion, an intelligent streaming server that is able to detect motion and only stores images if something happens that is worth imaging.

I myself had a hard time to get it running. I first tried to run it on SuSE Linux 10. But failed because of a series of problems. Then I tried running it on Ubuntu Linux 8.10. Ubuntu has a precompiled package for Motion. The tool is V4L2 aware and is known to work with the uvc-video driver, which is needed for the Quickcam.

Call me crazy to try a hot update while I really required to work on my system. Would you dare to do this with SuSE Linux? Or with any Microsoft Windows version? Or with Mac OS? Well, even if you would dare, these operating systems do not allow you to do that.

As already mentioned in my first impressions about Kubuntu, I expected Kubuntu as a Debian based distribution to provide a smooth upgrade. I was so sure that this can be done that I even tried it, while having a workshop that required my laptop. I wasn't dissapointed. Even more... I was astonished how smooth the upgrade was performed actually. This is something most operating system users just can dream of: Doing an online upgrade in the background, while working on the machines in less than 2 hours just one day after the official release of the distribution.

This article supplements my initial review. I will use the same categories, where I feel there are updates worth mentioning as well as some new ones. Please consider this article as a delta to my first impressions. To get a full understanding of this review, please read my first Kubuntu impressions first.

However as a long term SuSE user I will not simply delete my openSuSE 10.2 installation and replace it by Ubuntu. Especially since openSuSE became better and better and is currently really not a bad distribution. Also as a software developer with quite some experience in the IT world, I do not believe hypes until I experienced them myself (that's why I don't use Mac OS X or Windows Vista ).

Since I like KDE better than Gnome for its configurability, I have chosen to start with Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu.

The first step of my potential Kubuntu migration is an installation on a VMware to fiddle a little bit around with Kubuntu before passing the point of hard return, which is deleting my openSUSE installation. They may be SuSE biased and sometimes wrong, as I am not yet familar with Kubuntu. On the other side this review is intended to help SuSE users to decide, wheather it is worth to switch to Kubuntu or not - so a openSUSE bias is even intended to a certain degree.

I would be very thankful, if you could leave a comment at the end to help me in case I made a statement that is caused by my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu. And if you expecting some either openSuSE or Kubuntu bashing you'll be disappointed. Finally here are my first impressions and naive findings about Kubuntu.