Kubuntu instability...

[marcus]

On Monday 23 October 2006 21:23, Branko Vukelic wrote:
> What are your experiences with Kubuntu? I would especially appreciate
> comments from those users that used or are using multiple distros. Is
> it really somewhat unstable, or I'm just not doing things right?

I previously used Debian and a Knoppix HDD install for several years. A 
few months ago I switched to Dapper 6.0.6 and it works great for me on 
both desktop and laptop **.

Compilation has not been a problem at all either. I compiled the ivtv 
drivers and packages from scratch, and some other apps where the 
Kubuntu packages are outdated, without problems. You do need some time 
setting up codecs, but Automatix helps a lot with those things. 
Otherwise I'm very pleased with it. Kubuntu means I use Linux 99.5% of 
my computing time, only needing to boot Windows maybe once a month for 
some special apps.

The only instability I experience is related to Konqueror which does 
regularly crash, yesterday locking a CD-ROM drive. I then discovered 
using lsof to get the PID...and realised "Hey, that Konqueror process 
crashed hours ago and it's still got its grubby paws on the CD drive."

KPDF is also a bit shaky within Konqueror, and crashes on encrypted 
documents created by tkpdf, which Acrobat has no problem with.

Those are application-specific issues though, so I would say try and 
trace the culprit apps, it may not be Kubuntu related.


** I do have a problem on my Kubuntu laptop which did not occur using 
Debian Sarge. I sometimes need to boot several times, using recovery 
mode with startx as root, to get into X. I have a feeling it is to do 
with ACPI, in any case the keyboard and mouse do not respond once X is 
loaded, and the screen is black. For this I thought of going back to 
Debian, but maybe using APM will help. I'm not sure whether it's a 
Distro setup issue with xorg, an incompatibility between my laptop and 
ACPI/APM, or several issues all together.
In any case I cannot go on booting 3-5 times in order to get to my 
Kubuntu desktop. However, once the desktop is running it is very 
stable.


Marcus