Thursday, September 04, 2008

Thinkpad SL400 review part 3 (Overall experience with Kubuntu Linux)

I still dislike the placement of the page up/down keys. It seems logical, but its not, one rarely uses the arrow keys, but frequently uses the page up/down keys when browsing the web. the position of them makes me move my hand down, and press the wrong key accidentally. I don't like it. If I had realised the keyboard had been changed from a regular thinkpad before I bought it, I wouldn't have likely bought it.

Attached the HDMI and VGA to a widescreen TV.. worked reasonably well, display configuration in KDE occasionally crashed as I tried to mess around, but it is Alpha software and for the most part I got a 1024x768 resolution, which could probably be blamed on the TV itself being finnicky. I'll wait for a stable release to make any judgements.

Getting into X after startup USUALLY happens but occasionally the laptop just hangs before X, and theres nothing I can do. who knows why? Not me! I may have to check into xorg backup logs next time it happens.

Kmail, klibido, ktorrent, firefox, konqueror, flash, konversation... all work pretty well in kubuntu intrepid ibex. I wish they'd make a new version of klibido though. Amarok is pretty buggy still, Plasma is 50% useful, but not by default. A lot of configuration options are missing in kde 4.1 still. I'm confident they'll come eventually, but no big deal. I would occasionally lose a panel bar or something would get messed up. qcomicbook crashes on all zip files I tried for some reason. dolphin file manager is pretty decent, and I quite like the dragon media player (and old dependable standby mplayer)

Plasma applets like the comics one and the one that gets photos from flickr.. are too annoying to be used in any capacity. not very configurable, and the image size always changes, causing the comic to overlap other things on the desktop.

Camera seems to be detected, but I'm not concerned with it.

I get about 2 hours of battery life on the machine with a 6 cell battery. Not bad I guess.

like I said in the previous post a few buttons, like volume control and print screen, don't work for some reason.

bluetooth works.

quibble about the LCD screen that came on this thing.. viewing angles aren't brilliant.

All in all, though, its working out better than I expected all things considered. Still, if possible I'd recommend buying something with linux already installed, or at least without Vista, cause no company deserves to be rewarded for shipping out crap like that.

No comments: