I've been on debian stable for many years as my primary desktop, being quite happy with relatively old software provided most things worked as expected. The only things I ever updated outside of the repositories were firefox, openoffice and only random other small things. However I finally have had enough. KDE 4.4 broke me. No, I'm not interested in using a different desktop. I tried and tried recently and they just never felt right, mainly because I've been on KDE for so long that it works the way I want it to (when it did work!). KDE 4.4 still had some showstopper bugs for my usage that affected me daily, and reporting them upstream has had no effect, because they're all fixed in 4.5 or later, and will not be backported to 4.4 on debian. Now it's not entirely debian's fault since they have to freeze at some point - I do understand that. It's just that kde4.4 was still... meh.
So I bit the bullet and installed (K)Ubuntu 10.10 on my primary desktop, which till now I'd only used on a laptop, but it had been quite respectable. After an uneventful install and reboot, my keyboard and mouse would not work. I tried different usb keyboards and ps/2 ones to no avail. Ironically the install DVD worked fine, and using the rescue mode I tried the first logical thing - I installed a -ck kernel that I had from my previous install. This fixed it. So anyway I'm not going to go on about distros because that's a long hard painful discussion that there is no answer to, and all I can say is there are different distros out there and just use what's comfortable for you. I'm also not going to try and review the distro. There are enough people out there that do this already. I just wish the KDE 4.x composite + nvidia driver combination causing high CPU usage and slowdown issues with kwin and xorg would be fixed :\ Search for kwin high CPU and nvidia and you'll see loads and loads of posts on heaps of forums with different distros and no solution. I'm betting it's nvidia's fault. (Disabling blur makes it use less CPU, but sluggishness kicks in after a while regardless).
So anyway the point of this is that I figured - what the heck, I may as well make some distro kernels for Ubuntu that people keep asking me about. So I've quickly packaged up an amd64 2.6.35.11-ck1 and 2.6.37-ck1 kernel. The older one I recommend for most people, and the newer one for relatively more adventurous souls.
For now they can be found here (no ppa or anything at the moment, just .deb packages):
Ubuntu Packages
Note that if you have a 32 bit Ubuntu install, but a 64 bit capable CPU (as all are in the last few years) you can still force install these kernels and they should work fine on 32 bit userspace. You might have trouble if you install other drivers though. There's a good chance these packages will work on debian as well, but I can't guarantee anything. Please report back if you try that combination out.
Enjoy!
EDIT: I added the backports ppa by kubuntu so that I can install kde 4.6 and all remnants of sluggishness are gone! Thank goodness. It looks like it was kde after all.
Congratulation. (For KDE not Kubuntu ;) ). I switched some time ago from Kubuntu to OpenSuse (would like to be the No. 1 KDE distro, but there are also other voices ..), because I wanted KDE and not Gnome with KDE. But as you already said, every distribution has pros and cons. So its good to have the choice. And as I can say, with day by day grass will be greener on the other side ;-)
ReplyDeleteYou are right, KDE4.5 is really better than KDE4.4. And the same valid for KDE4.6. The desktop effects are working there like a charm even with vesa drivers! Really good work. I was surprised and the Plasma workplaces are now usable too. I finally switched to the Find schema. Its KRunner on the desktop. I love it (and my mother too ;-) )
Back to the topic, so no repository for OpenSuse. Thanks. So I could keep my fun in compiling a kernel.
Btw, problems with NVidia 32bit drivers and KDE were the cause for me to switch to 64bit and now I recommend all to use 64bit, if they have a valid CPU. And your lrzip works better too ;)
CU sysitos
Thanks, though I'm already on 64 bit so that's not the problem :) I guess I could simply add the kde4.6 repositories to kubuntu since they support that. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteI have packed ck kernel for opensuse for a while...
ReplyDeletehttp://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jingtw/openSUSE_11.3/
but the kernel-devel and kernel-source confilt with the standard kernel. If you use them, take care about the verson and provider...
That is funny, I just switched from Ubuntu to Debian Testing since I wanted to use something a little more hands on and less popular. Not sure if I should stick with it though, I have been helping with Ubuntu for a long long time. I am glad to see a clever guy like you is in the Debian crowd though, makes me more confident in my choice! :) (Compiling 2.6.32+bfs now)
ReplyDeleteLook at Funtoo.org, recommend unstable, which is in between and fun:
ReplyDeleteGentoo ~Funtoo ~Gentoo
I'm glad you move to use latest KDE SC. :) it's works like a charm. Even now QT is facing a hard time since the friday nightmare deal. :)
ReplyDeleteHi ck, I've been slowly working on a ck ppa for Ubuntu. I've finally managed to streamline the ppa packaging a bit, so I should be able to track your developments more closely. But if you ever think about doing your own ppa, you should let me know. We should keep in touch.
ReplyDeleteCool, are you going to use my packages in your ppa?
ReplyDelete@ Jing, thanks for your ck repositoy for OpenSuse. I think, it was my first start (after some googling how to change the responsibility of Linux with BFS as answer). After some trouble with it I changed to the manual mode. Learned a lot and after some missing modules and codepages later ;) the .config is done. So its no much hassle anymore. And with NVidia and wlan drivers an additional module compilation is always required after a new kernel. (Side note: Why does OpenSuse doesn't support DKMS?)
ReplyDeleteCU sysitos
the .37-ck2 deb is working fine on debian btw
ReplyDelete