I hosed my PCLinuxOS install by running an update and playing around with stuff. It just stopped booting into kdm and all I got was a console login from which I was unable to recover the GUI.
So I picked up Kubuntu 8.10 and gave it a whirl. The good: Installing new stuff is very fast compared to PCLinuxOS. Close to the maximum ADSL speed that I pay for from my ISP. I attribute this to the fact that there are good NZ mirrors for *buntu repositories. There also seems to be lots of community support for *buntu derivatives. The bad: KDE 4.1 seems less configurable than KDE 3.5. Maybe the options are just better hidden. I need to play around a bit more to find my way. The ugly: Gotta jump thru hoops to get W32codecs and libdvdcss. The only DVD player in the house is this laptop. I *need* libdvdcss. For future reference, here are the hoops thru which one must jump: Add the repo: sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list Add the GPG key: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring sudo apt-get update Install the codecs: sudo apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2 I admit google was my friend and helped me to find that info quickly, after I discovered that automatix, which I used for my brother's Kubuntu a few years ago, seems to have disappeared. Once again, I am glad I had /home on a separate partition. Most apps are now using the configuration files they found in my home dir, even though they were from a different distro. Yuri
