After I wrote my blog entry about the Feisty first alpha being available I decided to give it a try. I think the reason I do these crazy things is that it now takes virtually no time to try a Kubuntu Linux distribution. The process is down to:

• Download the image (Konqueror does that)
• Burn the CD (a job for K3b)
• Boot (on anything as it comes up live off the CD)
• If I like it, seven steps to install

Well, that is what I did with the boot (and install) happening on my T23 ThinkPad. It booted fine and the KDE desktop came up. I went to K->Internet->Wireless Assistant. It showed me my wireless network. I told it to use DHCP (it's default). I'm connected. After a bit of playing, I decided it was worth installing. The sequence is becoming very familiar but here are the specifics after clicking the Install icon on the desktop.

1. Description -- Nothing to do here other than click next. It just explains what you are doing
2. Select language -- Lots of choices. I picked English.
3. Select location -- You can just click on a map. My only question here is why are Costa Rica, Guatemala and such listed by country name but if you point at Nicaragua it just says Managua? Some of us live in other cities.
4. Select keyoard layout. In US English, you have 7 options now including Russian phonetic. I picked Alternative international which I think is what I want so Spanish accents work. Turned out I was right. (To enter accented characters (including ñ) you press and release the Right Alt key, then the accent and finally the character.)
5. Enter your desired login name, password, and computer name.
6. Select a disk. I picked erase all of the only disk I have buy you can edit the partition table.
7. Confirm.

I'm up. Again, started Wireless Assitant and all was well with the network. There were updates--148MB of them so I fetched them. All seems fine so far.

I started up Adept to look at what wasn't installed that I might want.There are almost 5000 packages in the default repositories, 879 of them were installed from the CD. (As Tony pointed out, the beginning user isn't going to want to go through this list. That's fine, they can just use the graphical "Add/Remove Programs" application.) I added dia, festival, firefox, gawk, karbon, kchart, kde-i18n-es, python-reportlab, and Quanta.

Damn. Update failed. Turns out that networking had stopped. So, reboot time. I am not sure if this was a problem or just a timeout as the system was idle overnight. Restarting and all seems fine. Another 69MB of downloads. The positive part is that virtually everything I wanted was already installed. One program that I do need is unison. It wasn't in the initial list in adept. Once this download is finished, I will enable the other repositories (there are included--just configured as off by default) and grab it.

Ok, now over 20,000 packages and I got unison. I'm a happy camper. I did add Opera to the mix (downloading it from opera.com). The system seems completely stable and the applications I tried for at least half a day worked fine. I did have one problem with the WiFi connection dropping which seems to have gone away. I also tried a bluetooth dongle which had worked on Edgy and it received a bunch of errors and didn't come up. Being interested, I tried a USB flash drive and received the same errors. Thus, it does appear there is a USB problem.

This was far from an extensive test but I feel Feisty Fawn is well on its way to being another great Kubuntu version.