The Digital Bedouin - The World in a Digital Age!

I had installed Kubuntu 7.10 a week ago so I could ssh tunnel some remote X apps that FreeBSD doesn’t have native support for. This means you Adobe (Flash) and VMware (server console)! Anyways, this morning for some reason the box had reverted back to it’s old DHCP assigned IP address vs. the one I had set in /etc/network/interfaces . Yes, I did restart the network service when the initial change was made. However, I will give Kubuntu the benefit of the doubt and let that pass. However, when I tried to check the network preferences I found out that the system settings center is not installed by default. Ummm… Joe user won’t know to edit /etc/network/interfaces to switch from DHCP to static addressing. Okay, fine. I look for the package manager. Nope. It’s not installed either. So, one apt-get install kde-systemsettings later I have the “System Settings” panel. I go to Network Settings, enter my password for admin mode and error. You don’t have the knetworkconf module installed. Ummm, yeah. Good call devs. So, back to konsole and apt-get install knetworkconf and all is well.

Kubuntu is supposed to take after Ubuntu and be a moderately user friendly for your parents distro. It failed. In review: There is no package manager installed by default that I can find in the Kmenu. Although there is kcontrol for most things, why is the kde-systemsettings package and some of its modules not installed by default? Just seems silly to me.

Before I get shredded, just let me state that this a comment on a small section of Kubuntu which in my mind makes it unusable for the average user. Personally, I run FreeBSD as my desktop and server of choice, followed by Xubuntu if Linux is a must have or Debian for a server. Solaris takes 3rd place and Windows is a long, long shot at 4th. I love KDE apps and even though I run XFCE as my primary desktop, the K apps are always installed and I’m really looking forward to KDE 4.1!