Ben Kevan’s Blog

openSuSE 10.2 or Kubuntu 7.04

So with all the craze going on about “Ubuntu/Kubuntu” lately I decided I would give it a valid shot. I downloaded Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 and went to install it on a secondary drive on my Dell Latitude D820. So off I was, but ran into a problem right off the back since I was trying to install it while docked on my docking station. I removed my computer from the docking station and restarted the installation, and off we finally were (openSuSe 10.2 installed just fine while on docking station).

Note of the installation it was fast and easy, although you couldn’t configure too much during the installation (package wise). Guess this is the downfall of the single cd installation. I finished the installation without problems and rebooted. The reboot seemed to take longer then my openSuSE box, so I timed the Kubuntu boot (Without VMWare or NVIDIA drivers installed) and the boot up time was 1 minute and 26 seconds. Put in my openSuSE drive and timed the boot (both times were started the instant the power button was pressed to the time the login screen was up) and got a time of 1 minutes and 9 seconds, and this is with VMWare Services and NVIDIA Drivers loading at startup. This to me was a suprise since Kubuntu was a fresh install and my openSuSE box is loaded.

Next the package management. This can easily be an RPM / DEB debate, so I’ll just say we know debian packages are fast, and tend to have less of “depenancy hell” issues. I was very happy with the Kubuntu package manager Adept and Adept Updater, maybe Novell should look at making Zen Updater and YaST stable (as if they haven’t been trying since 10.0, although they have come a long way).

Setting up Beryl on both Distro’s was pretty simple and I didn’t really run into any problems. Installation of the NVIDIA drivers on both were also straight forward.

Right now Kubuntu seems to be more responsive, and I’ll verify that once I add more things like Lotus Notes / Sametime / Kontact / Pidgin and a bunch of other apps that I use.

I need to familiarize myself a little more with the avaliable repositories for Kubuntu so I can possibly get a Pidgin repo instead of having to keep the packages up to date manually (it’s not a big deal for me, but really looking at it for the “Normal User”).

This is just a quick part one note about my openSuSE 10.2 vs Kubuntu 7.04 experience and it’s only been a day (last deb installation I used was an older Ubuntu box), so as of right now I will keep my openSuSE 10.2 machine as my main production box, but that doesn’t mean it is not going to change.

I am really intrested to see the changes in 7.10 and openSuSE 10.3 since they will be coming out around the same time. I think that will be really my turning point when I test those Distros at that time.

But with that said, check back about mid week and i’ll give an update after about a half week of usage on Kubuntu.

Safari on Windows .. They should have done more R&D

So apple decided they were going to show the PC people what a piece of “Mac” software would do for a PC, and the answer was clear.

Slow it down.

Not only did it take more memory then a rival named firefox (I myself prefer Opera to both IE and Firefox (and obviously now Safari), but you lose valuable features like CTRL+[Enter].. Sure you can just put google and press enter, but then it has to search through the root domains and takes much much longer then just typing google.com, or google CTRL+[Enter]

Edit: Just to add, there have been 8 Vulnerabilities discovered in day 1 of being released:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/12/0120230&from=rss