Teleidoscope

Mon, May 31, 2010

Kubuntu Network Edition

Posted at 11:02 am MDT to Technology

You know you are in the right career if you spend your day off doing the same kinds of things you do at work.

My Dell Mini with Ubuntu Moblin Remix is a slick little computer, and the OS
seems solid and w.ell integrated with the hardware(one advantage to buying
hardware and software together: all the drivers work. The user interface is
clean and legible and the features I used seemed to work well. However, I am not
the demographic this system is aimed at. (Geek women who hand-wire-wrapped
their first computer 30 years ago are a very small demographic, so there is very
little aimed at us.)

• I never used any of the social networking features.
• The email client was
  annoying -- it is a work in progress according to the developer's comments
  on-line, and may eventually have the features I want, but it isn't there yet. I
  ended up accessing my email through the web interfaces.
• And, by design, Moblin does not support the use of a login screen or screen
  locker.

The Moblin project has been absorbed by a competitor of Canonical (the makers of Ubuntu) and there have been no updates to Ubuntu Moblin Remix for a few weeks and no reports about future release versions, so it seems to be a closed project.

The current version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx, 10.4) which came out at the end of April includes two netbook variants: Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE), based on the Gnome desktop, and Kubuntu Netbook Edition (KNE), based on KDE (the K Desktop Environment).

I have always preferred KDE, and my favorite email client is part of the KDE ecosystem.

On Saturday I did a full backup of the Mini to my server. I haven't loaded any music onto it yet, so it was only about 6 and a half gigs, and the rsync did not take very long. While the backup was in progress, I downloaded the KNE Livedisk and burned it to a DVD (it was a CD image, but needed the larger CD size, and I did not have any in the house).

The Mini has a cool feature: at boot, on the screen, it says to hit F2 to change the settings or F12 to control the boot source. The message saves me from wondering which boot setting key is appropriate out of the half dozen or so that are used by different manufacturers. The separate boot source setting means I don't have to drill down through menus and make a permanent change. I can just change the boot source for the current boot.

The Live Disk booted and looked great, but could not load the WIFI driver. Checking on-line I found that this was a known problem: the Hardware Driver updater has problems pulling data from USB sources in the absence of a network connection. There were reported workarounds, and I had wired Ethernet available if i needed it, so I rebooted into the Livedisk and told it to install.

The installer offered a dual boot setup. So now I can switch back a forth between Moblin and KNE. I already know I will eventually switch to KNE completely, but I don't need to do it immediately. I'm not short of disk space on this box (yet).

Getting the WIFI driver loaded and working turned out to be a royal pain. The Hardware Driver Updater really doesn't like working without a network connection. Even copying the contents of the DVD onto the hard-drive to take the USB drivers out of the mix didn't help. (And being able to copy the DVD onto the HD shows the USB drivers were not a general problem.) I finally broke down, grabbed the Ethernet cable from my briefcase and plugged into my router.

The WIFI driver loaded but did not want to sync with my router. I downloaded and installed all of the latest updates over the wired connection. Still nothing. I swapped out NetworkManager for Wicd, which I use on the big laptop. Still nothing. (When I booted back to the Moblin side, it connected fine.) But after a couple of reboots it suddenly started connecting.

I suspect I should invest in a new router one of these days... the old one seems reluctant to sync and also doesn't support WPA as more recent models do. With a newer router, even Network Manager might work.

The new software is mostly fine, The netboook layout is spiffy, but I think they should have spent less time on eye-candy like making the icons run around the screen and more time on functionality like providing a menu editor.

There is also a weird pattern of changes not showing up until after a couple of reboots. I think some of the new widgets have a caching or syncing problem. Or maybe the whole environment does, considering the behavior when I was bringing up the WIFI.

The main software infrastructure change I made other than the NetworkManager/Wicd shift was to supplement PackageManager with Synaptic (from the Gnome space) for software updates/additions/removals. The Package Manager user interface is very annoying: it shows rather generic package descriptions in large clear type, and the actual package name in very tiny, faint grey type suitable for the bottom of a sleazy contract. And they aren't sorted sensibly. The Synaptic user interface is at least legible and alphabetical.

The Mini's screen is small but very clear. The Moblin interface was readable as configured out of the box, but I find myself tweaking the KDE font size from 7 points to 8 in many of the apps. I should probably make that change global and be done with it.

What happened when I started loading packages with Synaptic, and also outside the package management system is a saga in its own right.

Continued on next rock...

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