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Page 2 of 5 My first impressions of Kubuntu 6.06 are certainly positive. As I say, it is a nice minimal distribution, yet at the same time it offers quite a lot of applications. It lacks stability but I presume this will change in the final release. I am eager to see the final release of Kubuntu 6.06 with the final version of the installer. I tried the Live CD (beta 2) and attempted to install the Live CD to my harddrive but the installation would not move beyond the first screen with the warnings that this is not the final version of the installer and that it is not stable yet, so data loss can be expected. Then I got the latest build (Flight 7) and the installer started but when I chose to manually edit the partition table because I have some other partitions on the same harddrive that I would like to keep intact, the installer crashed. I tried to install both Beta 2 and Flight 7 on my old desktop machine but there the Live CD did not start at all, even in Safe Graphics Mode. I got a message “Unsupported Mode” as many times I attempted to run the Live CD and that was it. The same message appeared with Edubuntu Live CD, which is hardly surprising since in this part the two Ubuntu-derivatives are the same. Until now, I have never had such an issue with a Live CD, so I decided to temporarily give up and wait for the final version to check again. Crashes in the installer and imperfect support for old hardware are known issues for Kubuntu 6.06 and I am not the only one who has experienced them, so I don't see this as a disaster for a beta version. Unsuccessful installation attempts were not the only unpleasant surprise. A couple of times, when I restarted or shutdown my laptop, the Live CD made it freeze. I received a message to remove the CD, close the tray and press Enter to continue but pressing Enter had no effect, so finally I had to turn the laptop off from the power switch. Well, while testing and reviewing various beta (and even final) versions of software, I have seen much more disastrous bugs and issues that involve data loss or hardware damage, so this is just one small bug that needs to be fixed.
Inside Kubuntu 6.06 From my First Impressions you might have got the impression that Kubuntu 6.06 is barely usable. Certainly, it is not true. Kubuntu 6.06 is still in beta, which means that there will be no other features added to it in the final version, only bugfixes and performance improvement are to do be done. When you get inside Kubuntu, you will notice a couple of new things. The most significant change is that Kubuntu 6.06 is running KDE 3.5.2. Also, there is a new menu item (Add/Remove Programs) on the main menu and now Kubuntu 6.06 comes with the official Open Office 2.0. It's worth mentioning that System Settings has new modules as well. The complete list of new features and changes can be found in the documentation that comes with the distro. I don't think it is necessary to make a comprehensive list of all the packages that are included in Kubuntu 6.06. There are graphic programs and Open Office 2.0, Internet applications (but not FireFox), a program for working on remote desktops, calculator, etc. Probably two of the programs that can be mentioned explicitly are the System Settings panel (because it has a couple of new settings that were not available in 5.10) and Adept (the package manager - one of the differences with Ubuntu, which has Synaptic for this purpose). The starting screens of System Settings and Adept are shown in the next screenshots. System Settings is getter richer and better and it has many modules for fine-tuning one's system, which in my opinion is very important for any Linux distribution, no matter if it is for beginners or for experts. 
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