New build - hardware issues with KDE4.1

My current computer is getting a bit long in the tooth, a dual-boot KDE3/XP machine, so I decided to build a new one tol run KDE4, for details of the h/w spec see the end of this post.

The build went OK and I installed Kubuntu 64-bit and KDE4.1 and the PC boots straight into KDE4. I have not yet tried to install any additional software.

All devices indicate that they are working:
- the computer plays sounds on startup/shutdown
- both disk drives ('/' and '/home') are recognised though I expected more than 877GB free space on the 1TB '/home' drive with nothing on it, but my maths could be wrong...
- USB devices are recognised when connected

However there are a couple of problems:
- no Internet. I've got cable broadband; with Kubuntu and KDE3 I just had to install, connect to the cable modem and it worked. Perhaps there's some configuration needed in KDE4 but if so it's not obvious.
- screen resolution. My monitor can display 1680 x 1050 yet KDE4 only allows a maximum of 1280 x 1024.

I suspect these problems are because there aren't Linux drivers for my motherboard so if anyone can confirm this or has any suggestions how I can resolve these issues I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

Nick

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
GPU: ATI 4850 (Powercolor)
HDDs: Both SATA, 320GB for root and swap, 1TB for /home

 

In order:-
Free space - By default, all *buntus reserves a chunk (10%?) of each HD to ensure you don't run out. You can claim this back but I can't remember how I did it.
Internet - You do probably need to play with network settings, but I'm a Gnome/ADSL user and the tools are different for KDE/cable, sorry.
Screen - You'll need ATI's driver blob to get the best from your video card. Once you have network access, install envy-qt from synaptic.

You may get better advice than mine from the Ubuntu forum.

 

if you could post the output of lspci so we can see what network card we are dealing with

 

Yeah, I took a look at lspci and the controllers weren't even listed! So I took a punt on the beta for Kubuntu 8.10 which has just been released and these problems have gone away, perhaps they have just caught up on the drivers?

 

As for the hard drive space remember that Kubuntu isn’t exactly a light weight distro, and you have a swap partition as well.

 

When partitions are formatted by default the OS reserves 5% of the space for /root, which would be 50 gigabytes of your missing space accounted for. When you partition the disk you can normally turn this off or change the amount of space, I guess it depends on your partitioning tool.