As I skipped 7.10 “Gutsy” release, I preferred to do a fresh install from Hardy Heron LiveCD instead of two-step “Feisty » Gutsy » Hardy” network upgrade. I installed Hardy right into the existing Feisty partition replacing the old installation. Separate home partition was left untouched to keep all my personal preferences and data in new system.

It took ~25 minutes from booting the installation CD to logging into a working system.

Unsurprisingly good

No doubts, Kubuntu developers and packagers spent this year not for nothing. In general, Hardy is a better system than previous Kubuntu versions. It loads essentially faster and many little annoyances was fixed. Good job!

Hardware compatibility

Ubuntu systems are known to have great hardware support. As far back as 7.04 version, it recognized my hardware configuration including such exotic devices like DVB-card and CDMA modem without any problem. The only trouble was my HP LaserJet 1020 printer for which I had to install and configure foo2zjs package manually. So, it was nice to see it’s fixed in Hardy; now my printer is supported via native HP open source drivers and working out the box.

A bad surprise was that Hardy could not detect my monitor automatically and set failsafe 640×480 resolution as a result. It was strange as it was no problem with it in Feisty. Even when I’ve clicked “Detect monitor” button manually, it detected it as default “plug-n-play” monitor. I had to remember a model of my monitor and select it from the list. Not a big deal, but a pity though.

KDE 4

Looking great and nice but apparently, a lot of work is still needed there. Crashes are not unusual everywhere and the single Plasma panel looks more like a prototype than a part of a desktop for the real world. It’s half-baked, almost not configurable and I cannot setup a desktop I need for my tasks (IMHO, an essential fault for any Linux software).

So, I’m use the “solid rock” KDE 3.5.9 as a primary desktop environment for work and sometimes switch to KDE 4 just to get a feeling of  bleeding edge desktop technologies.

Grumbles

• Dolphin – I already grumbled at it and I still have no idea what are the reasons to have yet another desktop file manager. Konqueror was a default KDE file manager for years and a whole generation of Linux users grew up with an idea of this software inspired by Konq. Dolphin’s user experience is different in many ways and totally unusual for me (and I think, I’m not alone). No matter if Dolphin is good or bad, I need Konqueror, thanks!
• Samba didn’t see my home network after installation. And I was unsuccesfull to fix it using configuration GUI in KDE Control Center (though I’m not a sysadmin guru and might miss some options). Finally I managed to configure the network by manual editing ‘smb.conf’ taken file from a backup of previous installation. Maybe it sounds trivial for experienced network administrators, however I remember that I didn’t edit any configs to get Samba working in Kubuntu 7.04.

I should say I hate disks. They are taking a lot of space, cluttering all around, getting scratched and getting lost sometimes. I am too lazy to stand up and find a CD/DVD on a shelf just to get a movie or a song. I already got all my music collection in the computer as MP3 files and used to grab every new audio CD immediately. I’d like to do the same with DVD movies – rip them from the disks, convert them to something like MPEG4 and provide shared access to the media collection in our home network.

Our home LAN is small and simple – there are only two workstations connected by an Ethernet cable. There are my main work machine running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the children room computer owned by my daughters. The last box runs XP Home Edition, it is weaker and got a smaller harddrive than the Linux box – so server/client roles in the media network were obvious.

As the Linux box already runs Samba, the solution for sharing the media files over the network was ready. I only created a Windows network drive on the client machine and linked it to the Samba share on a server filesystem. I’d like to have more sophisticated solution for media organizing – something like a specialized media server with advanced metadata/annotation/categorization features but found no one so far. All in all, simply movie titles and preview thumbnails are good enough, and my children have no problems to navigate over the movie collection.

Well, my only task was to rip the movies from DVD’s. My first try of ripping DVD using the familiar tools was unsuccessful. Strangely, K3b – a swissknife for all CD/DVD tasks in KDE – could not rip video DVD’s in Feisty. As it was turned out, it is Kubuntu-only limitation and I have no idea is it a result of that copyrights paranoia (though grabbing the audio CD’s works fine), or just a miss of packagers in Canonical. The people said it is still unworkable in 7.10 Gutsy. Of course, I might recompile K3b from sources but I decided to look for another ripping tool first.

There is a nifty command line utility: transcode. It can convert video from one format to another using lots of import and export codecs – and directly from a DVD too. In fact, you need to install it if you want to rip DVD’s with K3b, though it had no help in my case. Using transcode has only problem – you should be a video engineering guru to understand its manpage with lots of all transcoding options. I didn’t want to learn all that stuff – I only needed to convert videos from DVD into AVI/MPEG4 files with the same frame size and without visible loss of quality.

I finally chose dvd::rip – a GUI frontend to transcode written in Perl and GTK+. In Kubuntu, you can found it in multiverse/graphics repository section. If you want to get compressed MPEG-4 files, you will also need XVid codec (multiverse/libs/libxvidcore4) or another DivX/XVid library for transcode.

Ripping DVD with dvd:rip is an easy two-step process: at first stage it copies the selected titles from DVD to the harddisk and lets you clip and scale the resulting movie. The program allows to choose from few presets of movie format and quality with previewing the results. Video gurus can also get into all codec’s fine-tuning options, while others can just go to the next stage by clicking on “Transcode” button letting the program to do its job with defaults. The second stage is quite long and finishes with a MPEG4 file in a container of a selected type (AVI, OGG or MPEG).

http://shipit.kubuntu.org

Thanks, Ubuntu!

I told I was not going to upgrade to Gutsy so far. Now I’m thinking that perhaps, I will need to do so because an important thing is going to happen soon – KDE 4 has been announced to be finally released in January, 2008. I am not sure it will be available through the Feisty repo’s.

Regarding the Gutsy received: It’s nice to see that you’ve got what you’ve ordered. Before, I’ve received Ubuntu (without “K”) disks instead of Kubuntu (with “K”) I needed. Also, it was delivered really quickly – about two weeks (yeah, quickly for my geographical location, of course). I was waiting for Feisty a month or so.

But hmm… they forgot the stickers! My Kubuntu (with “K”) box is still decorated with Ubuntu (without “K”) sticker :-)

After spending some time on googling and reading the comments and opinions of those who have answered “yes”, I finally decided not to upgrade. Well, not now.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not devoid of neophilia attacks and not afraid of experimenting with my environment and tools. I even love it. But I want to be sure that the results would improve my life’s quality or, at least, the things are exciting new and interesting to try.

The sum of innovations in Kubuntu 7.10 doesn’t worth a time, a bandwith, and (as it turns out) a degree of a risk to break working Feisty installation. I am pretty happy with it – perhaps it is the best Linux I ever had – and I am definitely unwilling to change the things without essential reasons.

The reasons they tell why do I need an upgrade look strange. Dolphin as a default file manager? Sorry, but I don’t need a file manager – I need also a local documentation browser and a client for SSH and for FTP and for Samba and WebDAV and SVN and for other stuff and it should have the tabs and a console at the bottom and… In short, I need Konqueror. Replacing it with a file manager (even if it is a really good one) – it’s nothing but downgrade.

Strigi search? Everyone says it is still an alpha so putting it into production release looks weird. KDE old file search worked fine and it is stable and well tested. And (excuse me for this product-placement) I use SCAN which does a lot more except basic full-text search.

OpenOffice 2.3? But to install it I don’t need to upgrade a whole system.

No, thanks. What might drive me to upgrade is KDE 4 Final, for instance. Or Beryl/Compiz, gettin’ fuckin’ stable, integrated seamlessly and not conflicting with basic KDE stuff. Or maybe, NEPOMUK or similar bleeding edge technologies released into production.

I am far from blaming Kubuntu maintainers and pretty well understand them. This is what happens sometimes when you have to provide a fixed release cycle but fully depend on other’s work. The fact is that the Linux world had no visible technology breakthrough in the last six months. Alas.

So let’s wait for the April, 2008.