First look at Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview and the KDE Plasma

[ Thanks to Caitlyn Martin for this link.
]

“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.”

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