Kubuntu KDE 4 Rave
 

Just setup up a new PC for my wife - MiniITX Atom, passive cooling on the
motherboard - whisper quiet and easily powerful enough for her needs - email,
web and card/strategy games.


Up to now she's been Windows XP all the way but she agreed to give Kubuntu a
spin as XP is definitely getting past its use by date.

First off the install, Kubuntu 10.04, done this a lot now :) Booted off a USB
stick.

As usually quite fast and painless, especially onto a blank PC. Hardware
detection - flawless, sound, USB, ethernet, video & effects all worked perfectly
without any configuration. Took 15 minutes. I remember the XP install taking
over an hour, and I had to trawl the net for drivers.

Couple of stand outs:
- Wireless has been a pain in the past but this time - My Billion USB
Wireless, plugged it in, Network manager auto detected, popped up a dialog to
auto create a connection with all the local wireless networks detected. Picked
mine, put in the pass phrase (WPA2), stored it in KWallet and its worked
perfect every since, auto-connecting on every boot. The XP machine was
continually flaky with it.

- USB Printer, a Samsung Laser ML-1740. Went to add it to the print manager
and found it already auto created with the correct drivers and ports etc. Just
worked. Gob smacked.


Wine - she had a few old windows 95 shareware games. They all worked fine under
wine. Except for Civilisation II. And freeciv while good - doesn't really
replace Civ II. Pity that one.

She really *really* likes the KDE Card & Strategy games, much better than the
windows ones. My complements to the creators of KPatience and others, they
look so professional and slick, they make a huge impression.


The KDE4 Desktop effects leave a good lasting impression too, the blurring and
various other subtle effects integrate well.

Dropbox - her documents where already stored on Dropbox, it was trivially easy
to get that working on Kubuntu. X-Fingers that OpenOffice 3.2 can cope with all
her Office2000 docs.

Looking very good so far, hopefully another Linux Convert! Not that my wife
cares :) just so long as it all works. But much less support headaches for me.

--
Lindsay
http://blackpaw.jalbum.net/home

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Kubuntu KDE 4 Rave
 

Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> Just setup up a new PC for my wife - MiniITX Atom, passive cooling on the
> motherboard - whisper quiet and easily powerful enough for her needs - email,
> web and card/strategy games.
>
Did the same thing for my wife about a year ago and she is a convert.
> <snip>
> Dropbox - her documents where already stored on Dropbox, it was trivially easy
> to get that working on Kubuntu. X-Fingers that OpenOffice 3.2 can cope with all
> her Office2000 docs.
>
Unless she does things that are fancy with Office2000 OpenOffice will
handle it. I use OO almost exclusively at work and we are a Microsoft
Office 2000 shop. Calc seems to be better that Writer. Writer weirds out
if you have a lot of embedded graphics and tables.
> Looking very good so far, hopefully another Linux Convert! Not that my wife
> cares :) just so long as it all works. But much less support headaches for me.
>
Much less headache! And as an added bonus, no more listening to her
mutter under her breath deprecations upon the whole of the computing
industry as she waits for Widows to boot. :)

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Kubuntu KDE 4 Rave
 

On Thursday 05 Aug 2010, Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> Just setup up a new PC for my wife - MiniITX Atom, passive cooling on the
> motherboard - whisper quiet and easily powerful enough for her needs -
email,

I'm probably off topic, but which board did you use?

I just upgraded my server with the Intel made Atom board that has a plain 12V
inlet rather than the ATX socket, hooked up to a 12V open frame Astec
switcher. It's saved 50% electricity consumption over the previous board.

I also used a USB flash drive to install, Ubuntu Lucid Server in my case.

Dave

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Kubuntu KDE 4 Rave
 

On Fri, 6 Aug 2010 03:35:31 am David Fletcher wrote:
> On Thursday 05 Aug 2010, Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> > Just setup up a new PC for my wife - MiniITX Atom, passive cooling on the
> > motherboard - whisper quiet and easily powerful enough for her needs -
>
> email,
>
> I'm probably off topic, but which board did you use?


An Asus AT5NM10-I Intel Atom D510 (Dual Core)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131630

Its been running very cool - 25c, no complaints about the speed either. I
wouldn't use it as a development PC, but its great for Web and Editing stuff.


The case fan on the foxconn RS-233 case is a little louder than I'd like,
though still ok. I might try what a guy at work suggested and plug the case
fan into the spare CPU fan socket to get better control other fan speed.

The fan blows directly over the CPU heatsink.
--
Lindsay
http://blackpaw.jalbum.net/home

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