This article will be a series of short rants.
1. A lot of people complain about broken suspend/resume on laptops with Linux. Usually, it is fixable, just search for your laptop model. In the case of this model, the fix is the same as Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04: add “pci=nomsi” to the grub boot line. This line now seems to reside in “/boot/grub/grub.cfg” instead of “/boot/grub/menu.lst”.
2. I have to recant. I used to recommend installing the kubuntu-restricted-extras package. That has some dependencies that are not necessary, less than ideal, or outright bad. It installs Sun’s proprietary Java runtime. It’s pointless and bloated. Just install openjdk, it’s standard, open source, and a better default Java. It seems to run Netbeans just as well as anything else. The restricted-extras package also installs the free Microsoft fonts, which is used a lot by the web browsers to render pages “more like Windows.” It turns out that this is not a good thing. The replacement, open fonts already installed on your system look better, render cleaner, and generally are more pleasant than those crusty old Microsoft fonts. Why do we want fonts from MS, anyways?
3. Install and run Chromium daily build as your primary browser. Seriously, this browser outperforms Firefox 3.5 in every way. It is much faster, doesn’t leak memory like Firefox seems to (still), and is just nicer to use. Get it here. Don’t get me wrong, Firefox is a great browser. Despite that, Chromium is still a much better browser. It is, trust me. For example, when the Flash plugin crashes, Chromium tells you that the plugin has crashed and continues functioning. Conversely, Firefox crashes completely and you lose everything, in every tab. The problem with Firefox is the crufty old Mozilla code base which was inherited from Netscape. It is a single process model that is extremely bloated and bug prone. I’ve looked at the code, it is disgusting. It’s not the fault of the Mozilla Foundation. They’ve worked hard to improve it, but it looks like a lost cause in comparison with Chromium and other KHTML derivatives like Safari. Chromium is derived from WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a rendering engine created by the KDE project, used most famously in the Konqueror web browser. So, it is fitting to run Chromium on Kubuntu, a KDE desktop.
4. KNetworkManager? Not sure what happened here. This network connection manager is completely brain-dead. Immediately install Wicd, and reboot.
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