On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:30 PM, yuri <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
google helped because the steps are VERY well documented :) automatix disappeared because it did bad things. can't rememebr what they were, but it pretty well hosed your system for updating. BTW you are unlikely to need w32codecs much these days. ffmpeg has come a long way. > > 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 >
