:First look at Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview and the KDE Plasma
First look at Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview and the KDE Plasma Nov 30, 2009, 19 :04 UTC (1 Talkback[s]) (2822 reads) (Other stories by Caitlyn Martin)
"Development versions of the forthcoming Kubuntu and Moblin variants were released simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" in September. This week we take a look at the Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview. Since the name of the release is more than a mouthful I'll refer to it as KNE from here on.
"I will admit that I approached installing and evaluating KNE with some trepidation. Every Canonical document about the new release makes it very clear that this is an incomplete product and very much a work in progress. It's difficult, at best, to judge an upcoming release based on alpha code. KNE isn't even alpha yet and some basic functionality is still missing. The desktop environment, called Plasma-Netbook, will see its first release as part of KDE 4.4. I knew I was looking at something on the bleeding edge and I also knew that criticism of the product as it exists today is simply unfair. There have been numerous upgrades since the initial release of the Technology Preview and as I've worked with KNE I've seen it slowly evolving and improving. What I describe today, what already works and what still needs work, may change with the next set of upgrades.
"To evaluate KNE I decided to stick with the intended platform, which means I only used my netbook: an HP Mini 110 which has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 16 GB SSD. The Mini 110 uses Intel 945 GME graphics and Intel HDA audio. All of the components in the Mini 110 are commonly found in a wide variety of netbooks from different manufacturers. KNE is available for Intel i386 and ARM processor architectures. This review only covers the i386 build."
