Now, how about that Kubuntu?

I have finally got around to installing Linux on my new laptop, and while I leaned towards Suse I finally decided to go with Kubuntu. The distribution is a derivate of Ubuntu, which in turn is based on the Debian distribution. The sole difference between Kubuntu and Ubuntu is that Kubuntu uses KDE instead of Gnome for window management.

The installation itself went on without any issues whatsoever, and everything booted just fine after that. There is a ATI Radeon X600 graphics adapter in the laptop, which I intend to use to its fullest — I need the binary ATI drivers. The problem is though, the installation of these drivers are not the easiest part in the world, and the error messages you get are far from easy to grasp (there are none). Instead, one has to tail the log file and check for errors. This is of course fine for an experienced and willing Linux user, but for those who “just want it to work”, this may be a tremendous problem.

Just to be clear, I actually saw some ATI drivers in the repository which I tried to install. Although they seemed to work fine, the OpenGL part could not initialize beacuse of problems with the kernel module.

Other things such as USB memory sticks and mice worked right away, and KDE did a great job by displaying a window when a new drive has been detected to give the user the power of choosing the preferred action.

The fonts however were a mess — They looked horrible! The first thing was to get the Microsoft fonts and install them from the Control center in After that, subpixel hinting had to be enabled, which also can be done from the KDE Control center.

The main font issue is that the DPI settings are way off. Using the standardized values of 96×96 DPI, luckily solved most font issues.

I also found Automatix for Kubuntu, which is an installation script intended to fix most basic software needs. This package is something I can recommend if you do not have the skills or time to do everything manually.

So, the experience — How was it? To be honest, I was gladly impressed by how nice KDE 3.5 behaves and looks. This is really a step in the right direction, and with KDE 4 I guess we will see some major changes. As for the rest, fonts really really needs to be “correctly” done when shipped, since most normal users do not know that there is something to do about the ugly default font settings. Also, the display drivers need to be even easier to install. Preferably, they should be installed in the main Linux installation. Although there are probably some license issues, but hopefully this can be worked out somehow.