KDE on DFly & question about firmware

[Thomas Schlesinger]

Am Mittwoch, 30. August 2006 17:52 schrieb Jonathon McKitrick:
> Two questions that will determine if I try DFly on my new laptop:
>
> 1.  I see a lot of KDE users here.  Does KDE work better that Gnome on
> DFly? 

Jonathan,

I don't know, if KDE works "better" than Gnome. but it works good for me. The 
onliest thing I'm missing is a native battery monitor. There's has been one 
developed by DesktopBSD, but unfortunately, it's not available in pkgsrc. I'm 
using gkrellm for battery monitoring.

> 2.  Is it a lot of work getting the firmware working for Centrino 
> wireless?
>
> Last winter, I got a new laptop and gave up trying to get DFly to run.  It
> was mostly the wireless firmware that gave me fits figuring out how to
> upload. There were broken links trying to find all the utils I needed... it
> was a huge pain.  Plus, ubuntu 'just worked'.

I use an ipw2200 (second generation Centrino), and it works. The driver for 
this chip is integrated in the DFly sourcecode (the module is if_iwi), the 
firmware for the WLAN adapter can be installed via pkgsrc. You can find a 
howto in our wiki. There are some little problems:

1. I ping in  30-second-intervalls to an address in my WLAN from my notebook 
(ping -i 30), otherwise I lose connection after a while.

2. When I switch my WLAN router (a SMC device) to certain channels, my 
notebook doesn't connect to it. In Linux, this problem doesn't exist.

3. I can't hide my ESSID, otherwise my notebook doesn't connect to the router.

> Also, and I *hate* to ask this....  ;-)
> But will current DFly perform better on my laptop than ubuntu?

I've used KUbuntu Dapper Drake before DragonFly on my notebook (Asus V6800, 
1,73GHz Pentium-M). I can't say, if DragonFly is faster, but I can say, that 
it feels slower in certain situations, e. g. an cvs update of pkgsrc. There's 
no "desktop process priority", but I use it daily,

If you use DragonFly, you'll don't have some things, you've in (K)Ubuntu:
- no KDE-integrated battery monitor
- no propietary fglrx/nvidia driver (-> no OpenGL 3d hardware accelleration)
- no beagle desktop search
- some programs don't run, e. g. kmymoney2 crashes on DragonFly
- no support for vertical scrolling on the Synaptics touchpad (lack of 
Synaptics driver)
- No Sun SDK/JRE (it's crashing on DragonFly)
- No capability of playing ogg sound events, if kdemultimedia is installed 
(wav and mp3 works, though)
- some pkgsrc packages must be compiled from source (no binary packages 
available at the moment, e. g. amarok, kdemultimedia)
- some pkgsrc packages don't compile

It may sound worser, then it is. I use KDE for some months now on my notebook, 
and it's ok for me for daily usage, I have a KUbuntu-installation on my 
desktop as "backup" ;-)

Thomas