A little while ago I decided, finally, that I’d had enough of dealing with Microsoft Vista on my laptop (an HP Pavilion dv7). I had been running Kubuntu Jaunty (Ubuntu with the KDE4 interface) using VirtualBox, and was pretty happy with it. I thought that it worked out pretty well because Vista seemed to handle all the hardware angles and at least I could still get to Linux when I needed it (for example, to make builds for my open source application, SLiteChat). However, when giving a talk about CMake to my company’s client, and using my laptop with a projector attached, the networking decided to freeze, thus making my talk impossible to continue.  That’s M$ Vista for ya. :/ Fortunately, I could switch to VirtualBox and at least illustrate stuff from the command line, but this frustrated me beyond belief. So I decided to take action and install a better OS on my system.

I had an interesting problem…here I had a big hard-drive, I had cleared a lot of space, and wanted to shrink the main NTFS partition down so I could create a partition for Linux. However, gparted, the tool that comes with the Live version of Ubuntu, failed to work. I could not shrink the partition, receiving cryptic error messages. Searching around I found out why: NTFS partitions get fragmented pretty badly and that can impede disk utilities that attempt to shrink NTFS partitions. Using free tools, I could defragment the drive, but still have issues shrinking. The reason is that NTFS creates system blocks that cannot be moved while the OS is live. The only tool I found that works is PerfectDisk (a shareware utility that has a special mode that runs its defrag utility at boot time). I will blog more about this fine application later. I want to stay on point.

After managing to reclaim enough space, I ran gparted, shrunk the size of the NTFS partition, and created a new partition for Kubuntu. I installed Kubuntu Karmic. After running Kubuntu for a while, I realized a lot of stuff wasn’t working right. Suspend to disk didn’t work, and I couldn’t log into my client’s WiFi which uses WPA. So I dumped KDE’s version of Network Manager and installed the GNOME version of the widgets. Voila! Networking started working correctly!

The story began to be the same for everything under GNOME–it just worked where I had to struggle with KDE’s applications. That’s when I figured I’d just take the plunge and install the package “ubuntu-desktop.” Here is a screen shot of the result:

My Ubuntu Desktop

The first thing I noticed was that applications seem to start faster. I would say things ran with a 10% boost of speed, leading me to believe that KDE4 added so much overhead. If you look at the screenshot, you see some of the apps I am running. Ubuntu comes with Firefox as the default browser, which is a win already. You can see RhythmBox, which is the default GNOME music player, Transmission, which is an excellent bittorrent client (it beats out KBittorrent by a mile or so), and the default terminal for GNOME. Now I think Konsole still rules over GNOME Terminal, because it supports tabs correctly, but the GNOME terminal handles the fonts and colors properly. Plus the whole look and feel of the fonts is just better, IMHO.

I’ll make more posts in the future, breaking down each thing you see on the desktop, but suffice to say, I am really happy with GNOME and won’t be going back to KDE4 anytime soon.

Tags: Linux, OpenSource, Personal // 2 Comments »