Another Opinion Among Many

As most have figured out, I’m a bit of a computer nerd.  My thing is playing with whatever new operating systems or versions of said OS.  So, I’ve had Xubuntu on my computer for some time, since the release of 6.06 LTS (long term support).  This version is the first one in which Ubuntu was released with the XFCE4 desktop environment.  I was impressed with the system I saw installed, for a first effort, but I can see where there could be some improvement.  XFCE suffers from the same things that Gnome does, in that the administration tools are sparse and unintuitive.  If I wanted to wrestle with it,I’d drop to a console, folks.  Actually, I had to do that a few times to get certain things to work.  Printing didn’t work out of the box and there didn’t seem to be any easy way to add my printer, an Epson Stylus CX1500 (inexpensive multifunction).  The KDE printing wizard has always been a better experience for me.  This time, I had to fire up my browser and configure CUPS from the tool they provide, which isn’t well explained anywhere easy to find.

This is going to be a newbie offering so I think that easy printer management tools should be on the top of the list, since most newbies want a printer and get one for free with the computer they purchase (c’mon, you know that you were sold when they rolled out the free printer!).  I think that there should be a “restore defaults” selection on the desktop as well, so that when you delete the XFCE dropdown menu, that you can get it back instead of only having the option of building your own.  The sound server should work out of the box, too, which it didn’t for my very common SB Live! sound card.
So, according to the Kubunt Wiki, I can get Kubuntu installed by installing the package kubuntu-desktop.  So, that’s what I did, through Synaptic, the Debian graphical package manager of choice.  With a really fast broadband connection, I’ve downloaded all 323 new packages that I need in around 5 minutes.  As I type, its installing.  As a hint to those who use Synaptic, you should click the little twisty arrow thing on the progress box to see the terminal output, as the install might stop on a configuration screen and you wouldn’t know if you didn’t look, as synaptic doesn’t translate that to a graphical reminder.

At this point, I’ve chosen to use KDM as my graphical desktop manager instead of GDM.  I hope that its as attractive and useful as the GDM is (my only preference in Gnome is GDM, but on a KDE system, use KDM - multiple logins work better with it).  Kubuntu also has Adept instead of Synaptic as the pacage manager front end.  Its been a while since I used it, so it’ll be nice to compare them.

We’ll see how it goes.  Installation is almost complete.

Update
I’ve rebooted into the new system to see what’s different and what’s not. I can see that there’s some more to do to “convert” it to a Kubuntu system. There are a few leftovers from the XFCE installation. The most obvious is the framebuffer splash. Well, at least it works. I’ll explore and report back.