Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Installing Kubuntu Gutsy

Ok I gotta admit that I must be the last Linux geek on earth to install Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 when people are starting to talk about KDE4 RC2 and stuffs.

I have been rather busy recently and don't have much time do spend for upgrading the OS. Finally, a few weeks ago, I took some time to attempt to upgrade from Fiesty to Gutsy.
As usual, I always backup the OS partition in case anything wrong with the upgrade. After I imaged the partition with Clonezilla, I started Adept Manager and upgraded all my packages and then perform the Version Upgrade as suggested in the upgrade instruction in Kubuntu site. However, the version upgrade installed failed and after restarting, it fails to boot properly.

I thought of restoring the partition but later decided to perform a fresh install by download the Kubuntu Gutsy Live CD. After downloading and burning the CD, popped in the CD and launch the Live CD. Installation was smooth and seems faster that when I installed Edgy. This time, instead of choosing ext3 for the root partition, I decided to try reiserfs. From my previous experience with openSUSE and this new installation, I feel that it is slightly faster than ext3. Also, it does not require the mandatory checking during bootup after every 30 mounts which is a little annoying with ext3.

Overall, I have to say that I am quite satisfied with Gutsy. Many things has improved. The big one is that nVidia binary drivers can be installed with just a click upon first startup and the default configuration work well. No need to hack xorg.conf and manually installed the binary drivers. The multimedia keys on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard also works out-of-box with amarok. One of the first thing that I did was to reconfigure /etc/default/acpi-support to enable suspend to work properly as described in this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-596666.html
After that, I have also installed lm-sensors and ksensors to monitor the CPU temperature. This is all for now. I'll still need to spend some time to install the build-essentials and stuffs that I usually use whenever I have some free time.

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