Karmic Koala Alpha 1 

Testing Kubuntu Karmic, and KDE 4.3 Beta. This is going to be a great release! KDE 4.3 Beta is much improved from the 4.2.3 I’ve played with recently, all small things, and I’m sure I haven’t found them all yet. One has to be careful updating this thing though, yesterdays updates broke KDE totally, good thing I have fluxbox installed to fall back to when things break. And they will break, this is an alpha release afterall. There’s not a medibuntu repository set up for Karmic, so the Apple trailers won’t play, but everything else is working, Amarok can play daap streams again, pulseaudio seems to be working very well as my Audigy card now again outputs same signal to front and side speakers like I want it to. Flash videos don’t eat as much cpu as they used to.

I installed Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 1 on my main desktop, Athlon XP 2600+ , 1,5 GB ram, Nvidia 6200 AGP and 40GB /, 80 GB /home with ext4 as file system. It’s using less than 500 megs of memory as I type this while Amarok is playing in the background and Firefox running with 1 whole tab open. I realized I suck at writing reviews, so I’ll shut up and post some pictures for you instead, ok? ;-)

While I was taking these, Ksnapshot caused KDE to become unresponsive to anything but ctrl + alt + del bringing up the shutdown menu, and I found out ctrl + alt + backspace is disabled. Annoying.

The calendar has gained some new features, you now get to see the holidays marked in red on the calendar. Configurable too by Country. This one is showing all holidays in Finland.

You can find out more about KDE 4.3 here, and about Koala here.

If you wonder about the theme I’m using, it’s called air and available on http://www.kde-look.org