Review: Kubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot"

You can consider this to be the second part of a series of reviews of the relatives of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot. Today I'm reviewing Kubuntu.

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I've said some bad things about Kubuntu in the past. Mainly, it has to do with how a couple years ago on Ubuntu, KDE and GNOME would not mix very well, and Kubuntu's implementation of KDE, while vanilla-looking, wasn't very vanilla-working (and really didn't work well at all). Things have improved since then: Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" was generally lauded as the first good Kubuntu release since the transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4. Kubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" was even better, and this version has been reviewed by others as the best ever; not only that, but the aforementioned other reviewers have also said this is among the best KDE distributions out today, period. That's quite a lot of praise, so I'm seeing if (1) that praise is warranted and (2) I need to change my previously sour opinion of Kubuntu.

I tested Kubuntu on a live USB made with UnetBootin. I was going to test the installation...on a real computer! A $friend of mine in college heard me and another friend discussing computer-related things and how I thought it would be interesting and ironic if I could put Linux on an Apple iMac/MacBook and use it instead of Apple's Mac OS X. $friend had a slightly older Intel-based Apple iMac that $friend wasn't using, so $friend was willing to lend it to me for the year; $friend was cool with me using it to test and install Linux distributions on the hard drive, because $friend actually used a triple-boot Linux setup on the Apple iMac on a regular basis before it fell into disuse. I figured I should use this opportunity to try to install Kubuntu, so I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu website to create the appropriate live USB with another 2 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB stick I got 4 years ago but haven't used at all since high school; unfortunately, while the Refit bootloader (that I installed beforehand) did apparently recognize the live USB, booting just hung at the white screen. While I am aware of a few potential solutions, I've also read on the Refit website that different Apple iMac generations tolerate live USB booting at different levels: some are fully cooperative, while others pretend live USBs don't exist. I believe this particular Apple iMac is closer to the latter end of that spectrum, so I didn't pursue it further. I do know another friend who has been collecting many desktop computers that are a few years old, so I might ask that friend to borrow a working one for such installations. That'll have to wait for a future review though. In any case, this time around, despite my best efforts, installation did not occur. Follow the jump to see what Kubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" is like.

Review: Chakra 2011.04-r2 "Aida"

For a while, I've been reviewing Chakra GNU/Linux using only a VM because I've been unable to create a Chakra live USB system with UnetBootin and have been unwilling to use the destructive live USB tool "dd". Recently, though, I tried doing it with MultiSystem, and it worked fine, so I'm reviewing it today.

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Regular readers of this blog don't need much of an introduction to Chakra. It's a formerly Arch-based rolling-release distribution (though it is drifting farther and farther away) that aims to provide a user-friendly distribution with a good, clean implementation of KDE. That said, while it does target newbies, it also targets power users, KDE lovers, and Arch fans at the same time, and it hopes that its users are active in giving back to Chakra; that could be through simple things like filing bug reports or more involved things like actually participating in the development process.

As I mentioned earlier, I tested this release of Chakra using a live USB made with MultiSystem. I also tested the installation in a VirtualBox VM with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS; this was done in a Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini live USB session. Follow the jump to see what it's like, now that I'm finally testing it on real hardware.

Review: Chakra 2011.02 "Cyrus"

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Chakra GNU/Linux has become one of the distributions I now test regularly. Its appeal to me lies in the fact that it is based on Arch Linux (and is therefore comparatively quick and configurable), yet it comes with KDE already configured along with a more user-friendly system installer and package manager. I've already tested versions Alpha 5 "Panora", 0.2.0 "Jaz", and 0.3.0 "Ashoc". I figured I would test version 0.4.0 "Cyrus" whenever it got released, so I chose to wait until the news showed up on DistroWatch to test it. Unfortunately, that never happened; the latest news regarding this release was about 0.4.0 "Cyrus" Beta 2. Then, two days ago, I saw a news entry on DistroWatch about Chakra, specifically regarding version 2011.04 "Aida" Milestone 3. I wondered if the 0.4.0 "Cyrus" release had been scrapped entirely, so I headed to the Chakra website to check it out. It turns out that version 2011.02 "Cyrus" (renumbered from 0.4.0 for reasons I will also talk about shortly) was released in February itself and is now the current stable release; it was just never announced on DistroWatch. Darn it! Why doesn't anyone tell me these things?

As I just mentioned, the numbering changed from 0.4.0 to 2011.02. It looks like the Chakra developers moved away from the goal of a stable 1.0 release and chose to emphasize the rolling-release cutting-edge nature of Chakra by switching to a year-month numbering system. That said, the old numbering system clearly showed that Chakra is still alpha-release software; I don't know if I'm supposed to think the same thing with the current numbering system — more on that later.

I tested Chakra in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS and an available 10 GB virtual hard drive for installation. In response to a couple comments as well as articles on other blogs that I have seen, this is for a few reasons: I can't make a Chakra live USB without wiping it clean (dd) and I don't have too many blank CDs/DVDs lying around for these purposes, I can better control how Chakra responds in lower-resource environments (though admittedly 1 GB is still plenty), and I don't need to worry about messing up my installed systems on my computer. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Review: KDE 4.6

A couple days ago, KDE 4.6 was released for the world to enjoy. It boasts myriad bug fixes, new features for applications like Dolphin and Marble (among others), a revamped Activities feature, and better integration of GTK+ applications. I've come to enjoy testing new KDE 4 releases because it gets noticeably better with each release (or so I would hope), as opposed to GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, and other DEs which don't change much between "point" releases (i.e. X.Y ("X point Y")).
That said, it's not available for Linux Mint 9 "Isadora", and I don't plan on upgrading that until the next LTS release (Linux Mint 13 "M[...]a") unless some radical change (that I don't like) makes me switch distributions (but given the lead developer Clement Lefebvre's recent statements on the matter, that is highly unlikely). Right now, it's only (in terms of Ubuntu-based distributions) available in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and Linux Mint 10 "Julia" through a backport PPA. As I had a Linux Mint 10 "Julia" GNOME live USB handy, I used that to do testing; I will say that this method may have been the cause of many of the problems that you will read about shortly. Follow the jump to see how it went.

Review: Chakra 0.2.0 "Jaz"

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After a couple of news-related blog-posts, I wasn't finding any news particularly post-worthy. As I was looking at DistroWatch, I saw that a new version of Chakra (0.2.0 "Jaz") had been released. I was intrigued, as it's the release immediately after the first official "Phoix" release and the branching off from Arch. As Chakra is supposed to have changed a lot with the release of "Phoix" (and the last version I tested was Alpha 5 v4), I was curious to see how much better it has become since the last release. Unfortunately, I wasn't especially impressed. Read on to see why. (NOTE: This test was done in VirtualBox on my new laptop with 1 GB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. This is probably how all future tests will be done.)