I wish I could say I'm seeing progress, but from my pov, almost all the changes between this and the last beta are backward steps, not forward.
InstallationNot the installer itself, but the X system behind it. The JWM taskbar menu button no longer has any indication of what it is - just a grey button. If you don't know what to look for, its not much help.
The utilities menu has options for Gparted and Cfdisk. Neither works. Indeed, since cfdisk is now cfdisk.gnu for some reason, even attempting to start it from a terminal is likely to be frustrating.
I don't much care about a GUI installer - was quite happy with the old text mode. The main advantage that I can see for the GUI installer is that it provides a much better platform for rescue and maintenance work. However, if the menu doesn't work and command line options require a good deal of searching before they work, the whole idea of a GUI for install seems a bit pointless.
Installer Oh dear....
I've not had any problems getting the CD to boot or the installer to run through to the end for a while, but there are serious bugs which have been outstanding since the start of the SOHO testing cycle, and are still outstanding.
Keyboard layout. I've installed this beta 3 times now, just to make sure I've tried all the options. If I leave the 'use instalation locale' settings box ticked, I get (the correct) UK layout in X, but I still get US in console. If I untick the 'locale' option, I get the (incorrect) US layout in both console and X. I thought that (in the case of X at least), it might be because I'm using the probe method to create an xorg.conf.
So on this last install, I let it run fully automatically. Which means I've no cursor keys, so I will have to create an xorg.conf eventually. However, it hasn't helped, I've still got the wrong keyboard layouts in both X and console. I've managed to make the UK layout stick in X, but only by removing the US option from the KDE selector. To fix the console layout, my only option is to edit init scripts, which I really don't want to do. The GUI installer in VL6.0 Standard didn't have this problem.
UID. I had thought this was fixed, but obviously not - on the first install, I used the installer to create a new user - UID is set to 1002. So I'm back to having to install, skip user creation, then log in as root to TUI mode and use Vasm to create a user. If I said this was a pain, I'd be guilty of gross understatement.
SystemWicd is still demanding the root password on every restart. New (for me) with this install, it has also fallen over several times with the following error:
Could not connect to wicd's D-Bus interface. Check the wicd log for error messages.
VasmCC still lists Vlcpufeq as an option, which still does nothing.
Worse than that, KDE no longer sees the CPU as having throttling options. As a result, my CPU is running flat out. Very bad for battery use, and not real good for heat generation eitehr. The last beta might not have provided any useful messages, but it did at least allow the CPU to be throttled. If I go to System-Settings > Advanced > Power Management > Edit profiless > Cpu frequency scaling policy there is nothing in the dropdown menu at all. On checking, the correct module for my cpu (acpi-cpufreq) is loaded, but there is no sign of ondemand, and I have no access to make it work. This really is crippling, and means I will not be using the beta much at all.
Sound still requires a good deal of fiddling to get working. It looks as though alsa is in need of an update, since this does not happen any more with any of the other distros I've tried. In order to get sound working in the beta, I have to open the mixer, select channels, enable the speaker (which is never enabled by default in this version of Alsa for some reason) then go back and unmute the speaker, since for some reason, it is always muted when enabled.
I'm not even vaguely impressed with KDE 4.x. I didn't like the 3.x series of KDE all that much, but I did at least find them a lot easier to work with. Trying to do something as simple as add a widget to the toolbar with this version of KDE is a pain in the neck, and there are obviously still serious bugs in the interface. If I move things about on the desktop, then select 'lock icons in place', the next time I do anything involving a KDE setting, the stupid thing puts everything back where they were before I moved them. ARGH!
Locale. Idiot KDE is still convinced I live in Gurnsey (I must visit it sometime, must be something very special there), and I still have no access (other than logging into KDE as root) to change this. If I select the correct locale, I cannot use 'apply' since it is greyed out. If I log in as root and fix it, when I log in again as a normal user, guess what? That's right, I've moved back to Gurnsey!
I'm able to set up Samba reasonably well now, though the KDE inteface is abominable. Setting up a share it is
anything but obvious how you set the most basic part of the share - the path! I would love to get my hands on the KDE interface developers....
I also haven't (so far) found any way of setting things like fonts and icons for GTK applications, which is less than useful, since menu entries for most GTK apps are much bigger than the settings I have for native KDE apps.
Oh well, more later.....
Paul.
