First look at Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview and the KDE Plasma-Netbook 4.4 interface



By now almost anyone who keeps up with Ubuntu knows about the Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly Ubuntu Netbook Remix). What many people are not aware of is that there is now a Kubuntu Netbook Edition and an Ubuntu Moblin Remix in development as well. By the time Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is released next April netbook users will have three Ubuntu variants customized for their smaller systems. 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.





Installation and Configuration



KNE is currently available for download as an ISO image which can be burned to a DVD. I chose to use UNetbootin to create a bootable live USB stick. KNE is not included in the UNetbootin menu so I had to download the ISO to my hard drive and choose the option to use an existing image. This worked perfectly and I booted into a working live KNE system. The live system includes an icon to install to a hard drive. Since I wanted to give KNE an extended test drive I did just that. The installer asks the typical questions and should be straightforward enough for anyone with even a modicum of Linux knowledge to use. There were no issues whatsoever and I was able to install to /dev/sda7 and have KNE run side-by-side with an existing distro which was correctly recognized.







Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 desktop

(full image size: 361kB, screen resolution: 1024x576 pixels)

Once I was up and running I discovered that while my wired Ethernet connection was correctly configured, neither the wireless connection nor the 3G modem were available in KNetworkManager. In addition, my printer was not configured. All of this was expected as proprietary drivers are required for both the wireless and 3G connections and proprietary firmware is needed for my HP LaserJet 1020. In a standard Ubuntu installation a pop-up notifies me that my hardware requires proprietary drivers and gives me the option to install them should I so choose. No such notification was given in KNE. A visit to the System menu revealed a Hardware Drivers icon which brought up an applet which searches for the necessary drivers and allows them to be installed and activated one by one.







Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Hardware Drivers applet during the initial search

(full image size: 359kB, screen resolution: 1024x576 pixels)

The applet displayed the packages I needed: the open-source b43-fwcutter package to extract the firmware for my Broadcom 4312 wireless chipset and the proprietary broadcom-sta package. Clicking on the b43-fwcutter package correctly installed and enabled the software. Clicking on the broadcom-sta package, the second step, caused my system to lock up. The bug which caused this has been corrected in the updated 2.6.31-15 kernel, which is now available. If you have a Broadcom chipset you'll need the kernel upgrade before the driver can be successfully installed. With the upgraded kernel both the Hardware Drivers applet and wireless networking worked as expected. Since I don't have 3G service as yet I was unable to test the modem software and driver with KNE. Running the HP Setup program did correctly download and install the firmware for the printer and then configure CUPS. The process was simple, straightforward and no different from a standard (K)Ubuntu system.





Running Kubuntu Network Edition 9.10 Technology Preview



The only thing the new Plasma-Netbook desktop seems to have in common with a standard KDE desktop is the default theme and the wallpaper. I also found the way the desktop works to be quite different from other netbook-specific desktops. Expect to take some time to get used to the new way of doing things. There is a learning curve, precious little documentation as yet, and a few tricks to get around the incomplete or missing pieces of the desktop environment that I mostly found through trial and error.



The default desktop has four main items: a top panel which resembles what you see on a normal KDE, GNOME or Xfce desktop. This panel automatically hides itself to leave maximum screen space for applications. Below this is what is initially an empty bar with arrows on either side. Below that is a set of icons listing the various program categories you would normally find in the KDE "K" menu on a standard Kubuntu install. Finally, a tab on the right edge of the desktop replaces the cashew on the regular KDE 4.x desktop.



Clicking on any of the category icons restores the panel and displays a new set of icons for all the applications in that category. A "Home" icon is also added to the top, left corner of the screen which, if clicked, takes you back to the default desktop. If you mouse-over an application icon a yellow star will appear in the upper left hand corner. A single click on the star adds it to the empty bar. This allows you to place your favorite application icons on the desktop and always have them visible regardless of which menu you enter. If you mouse-over a favorite icon a red minus sign is displayed in the top left corner of the icon to allow it to be removed from the favorites bar. If you click on any application icon other than on the star or minus, that application is launched.







KNE 9.10 Hardware Drivers Graphics Menu with favorites displayed

(full image size: 408kB, screen resolution: 1024x576 pixels)

Switching applications and controlling the panel will eventually be controlled by a widget in the top left corner of the screen which the Kubuntu Wiki describes as "incomplete". Invisible would have been a better description. If you have very sharp eyes you will notice a tiny line near the top left corner of the screen along the top edge. Believe it or not, that's your widget. Mousing over that spot will restore the panel and clicking on the tab which displays either the application you were last in or the number of running applications, brings up a black screen with thumbnails of all the open applications, each with their icon superimposed on the lower right corner of the image. Sadly, KSnapshot doesn't work in this screen. It's a unique visual application chooser and I would have liked to have shown it here. If you click on a thumbnail the application in question will reappear either in full-screen mode or in a window on the desktop, whichever state it was in when last used.



There is another nearly invisible, undocumented desktop feature. If an application is windowed on the desktop and is then minimized while touching the bottom of the screen you will notice that part of the bottom of the display has yet another little line. That is the minimized application. If you click there the application will reappear. Once again you will need really sharp eyes to spot this future, incomplete functionality.



The default panel includes two tabs, one for Applications, which is the default desktop I have been describing, and one called Newspaper. Newspaper includes windows for a news feed window, weather, sticky notes, a calendar, and a cartoon. Unfortunately right now the news feed is only news about KDE and there is no way to configure it for anything else. I can see how this tab will eventually be quite useful, but at this time it is very limited.







Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Newspaper

(full image size: 334kB, screen resolution: 1024x576 pixels)

Plasma-Netbook does support multiple virtual desktops, something I find essential on a small netbook screen. Unfortunately there is no desktop pager on the panel and no way to add one at present. There actually is no configuration tool for the panel at all and no way to customize it or to add widgets. You can remove widgets but I'm not at all sure you can get them back if you want them later. The only way to change desktops is to enable screen edge movement from one desktop to another. As you can imagine this can make using the nearly invisible, incomplete widgets nearly impossible unless you enable a rather long delay. Considering that you need those widgets to change applications or access the panel, this makes using multiple desktops inconvenient at this time.



On a brighter note, Yakuake, the drop-down terminal emulator for KDE, works perfectly well in the Plasma-Netbook desktop. I find the application switching system in KNE a bit cumbersome at present. Yakuake allows easy access to a terminal window even when another application is in full screen mode. One interesting little quirk is that there is no Development icon category. If you add an application that would normally fit into that menu the icon is simply lost. For example, I installed Bluefish and no icon appeared anywhere. If I used Alt-F2 and start typing bluefish it auto-completes for me and the familiar Bluefish icon appears.



The selection of applications is essentially identical to a standard Kubuntu installation. KPackageKit and aptitude work exactly as they would in Kubuntu. No functionality is hidden and the interface hasn't been simplified for non-technical users in the way some other netbook desktops have been. KNE has access to all the packages for Karmic Koala in the repository by default. The KDE applications are all from KDE 4.3.2, the version used in the current Kubuntu release. Only the Plasma-Netbook desktop itself is development code. One additional bug is worth mentioning. The automated package update tool included in the ISO image has a bug which displays an empty box while updates are being installed. One of the recent updates does, in fact, fix this bug and correctly shows download and installation progress.





Conclusions



Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 really is incomplete. Despite the missing functionality and a few bugs it's pretty easy to see just how promising the Plasma-Netbook 4.4 desktop is. I was also pleasantly surprised that most of the issues fall into the category of inconveniences, not show-stopping problems. It's really surprising just how usable this pre-alpha development code already is.



Too many netbook interfaces take the cell phone paradigm to the point where it could only be appealing to new and non-technical users who don't do a great deal of work on their diminutive systems. KNE still offers something that resembles a netbook/cellphone interface but does it in a way that doesn't handcuff the experienced user who needs to multi-task and do advanced work.



Right now Kubuntu Netbook Edition is too rough around the edges for me to use it regularly. In that sense it is precisely as advertised. I am generally not a fan of netbook desktop design and I usually choose a conventional desktop environment for my HP Mini 110. Once completed it's quite possible that Kubuntu Netbook Edition may become the first netbook optimized desktop I could actually learn to like. This is one project that will be worth watching to see how it progresses.



