As many of you might already know, SuSE 10.1 has been released. I hurredly downloaded the 5 (yes 5) CDs, burned them, and began my usual upgrade. I’ve done this millions of times before (even back to my Fedora days), but this time, it hosed my system. I mean, it seriously cracked.

Anyway, I finally decided to do what I’d been contemplating all along, switch to Kubuntu on MotherBrain. I have enjoyed running Kubuntu on the Apple iBook, and I thought it would be a nice switch. For one, upgrades can be run simply by telling apt-get to do so. No more downloading (or buying) CD’s.

So, anyway, I did need ONE CD, the Dapper Flight 7 live cd. This was a real treat. I remember when I first tried SimplyMEPIS. It was a live CD that had the installation program built into it. Well, Kubuntu has apparently adopted this philosophy. While the system was being installed on my computer, I was surfing the web and checking e-mail. That certainly beats watching a screen with a little blue bar going across for two hours. The Kubuntu install was done in minutes.

That’s not to say I didn’t encounter a few problems. Actually, they weren’t technically even Kubuntu related. I have two hard drives with multiple partitions on each (hey don’t criticize me. I have my reasons). I copied a whole bunch of data to another drive before installing Kubuntu (you know, to back up). Well, I copied some files that probably shouldn’t have been copied. The filesystem didn’t like it, and I had to run reiserfsck a few times before Kubuntu would start. But hey, better to find out sooner than later. So, if anything, that’s a credit to the efficiency of GNU/Linux.

To make a long story even longer, everything is now running smoothly. I haven’t installed the printer yet, though, and reports of the (K)ubuntu printing issue are well known. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh yes, and XGL is running even better than it did for me under SuSE, if that doesn’t rattle your brain.

Anyway, the count in our house is now Kubuntu: 3 SuSE: 2. My wife’s desktop and laptop both still have SuSE. She’s calling me a sellout. I call myself expanding my horizons. You know, testing the waters. Oh my God! I sound like Shoe!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 4:08 am and is filed under Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.