Well, I finished up installing and setting up the latest Kubuntu release, Natty Beta 2. Everything went smooth, no hiccups at all. Seems a little peppier in its step, however the main reason for installing today was because I was tired of the slowness of my last install. Nothing like installing from scratch, only to realize you forgot to backup one directory, therefor losing a bunch of work. Seeing as I like pretty much everything about the latest Kubuntu, I will only address the things that are annoying to me or do not work at all.
Fonts
By default the fonts are awful looking. I am not well versed in all of the fontness, however I can say the fonts are blurry as hell after an install. First thing I did here was Enable Use anti-aliasing in System Settings, and then set the Hinting style to Full. After a quick restart the fonts are now nice and crisp looking.
Network Mangler
Jeesh, for 2 years now I have had to manually enter the MAC address of my wireless router because I utilize a hidden SSID. Looks like I will be spending another 2 years adding that address to ~/.kde/share/apps/networkmanagement/connections/{35570ccd-a656-491e-97d0-622d29ba020b} for seenbssids=. I will make sure I tag this post KDE so the Network Manager folks can yell at me and show me I am doing something wrong.
I seriously think those are my only 2 gripes, and both gripes are easily fixed in less than a minute each. There are a couple of new things too that finally work.
Printing
YAY! Huge hugs to the person who implemented the network printing stuff, or at least fixed it so now I don’t have to install the GNOME printer applet or whatever it is called just to install a shared network printer. Kudos to you my friend or friends, job well done!
Bluetooth
I can connect to my phone, I can send it a file! Haven’t been able to do this before. To be honest, I never used it, and after using it today it made me realize one thing. Bluetooth sucks, except for those little ear pieces we see all the wanna-be business people wearing. You know, the things where people look like they are talking to themselves but really aren’t, or they could the new school posers acting like they are important. I am choosing the latter there.
Like I said, overall I am really impressed with what I am seeing here. As some of you know, I have been a bit bummed over the past year with Kubuntu and Ubuntu and annoyed by so much. Seeing this release makes me cheer up a bit and realize just what I am missing by not sitting in IRC for 24 hours a day running pbuilder constantly. Damn, now that I put it that way, I don’t know if I was missing that 🙂
Kudos Ubuntu and Kubuntu hackers on a job well done!
