Quick Update

Hello there Linux fans. Sorry about the break between posts, but I had quite the busy weekend and really could not find the time to to update. So with that in mind, I have decided to give Kubuntu one more week in the spotlight as I didn't have the time to really give it a fair shake. But in the meantime, I will talk about some of the things that I have run into so far.

On the good side of things, the native KDE web browser Konqueror is a very compelling Firefox replacement. It renders pages very quickly and is pretty much a breeze to use, with just a minor adjustment period. I did run into a very interesting issue. Konqueror would not load the Adsense ads on web pages that I visited. This really isn't a deal breaker in any sense, unless of course you like viewing ads, just a weird happenstance. As for the system itself, I must say that start up and shutdown times are amazingly fast. Now I am not really one to care about such things, but it was quick enough for me to actually take notice of it.

Now, unfortunately, I must talk about the bad. First off, I had a major issue trying to set up a wireless connection. I tried every permutation of my setup info to get it to work with no success. I even logged into my Ubuntu install and copied the settings exactly from Network Manager and transferred them to Kubuntu. This was very annoying, doubly so since I have never had this problem with any other distro that I have used before. I must say that it got the best of me and I gave up and plugged the system into the router. The next issue I had is a rather minor one, but annoying still. I can't seem to figure out how to set the bindings on my macro keys for my keyboard. As I said, not major, just a pain. The last issues are all multimedia ones and mainly revolve around Amarok. I started by testing how well the system rips music and found that it couldn't encode to MP3, which isn't a surprise and a quick trip through the repositories to install LAME fixed that. After the music was ripped, I imported it into my library and told it to retrieve the artwork, the retrieval process took a full 10 minutes on a fairly snappy internet connection. WOW, WTF there. After the artwork finally arrived, I decided to try out the streaming radio stations, this is where things took a major turn for the worst as Amarok just completely died on me. No big deal I say to myself, I start up the player again, attempt to connect to radio and BAM it dies again. So far I haven't been able to get it to work.

So as you can see, I have been having quite a few problems with Kubuntu. Hopefully with an added week to test, I can make some sort of headway with the system, but right now it doesn't look to good. BRB for now.