It has been about a week since I installed Kubuntu 6.06.1 (as documented here), and it has gone pretty well so far, with just a few snags.

One snag was the newly infamous xorg bug that rendered X11 useless on my machine. I still have not upgraded to the newest xorg for fear that it may make X11 unusable again.

A second snag occurred when using KDE's runlevel editor (Control Center -> System Administration -> System Services). It screwed my system up so badly I ended up rebuilding it instead of trying to figure out what it did. Something is a little non-standard about Ubuntu's (and Debian's) runlevel scheme, and doesn't seem to play nicely with the KDE tool.

I updated my installation guide a little bit, to change the default Java installation to use 1.4 instead of sun-java-5. Firefox seemed to lock up frequently on Java sites, so I'm downgrading to 1.4 to see if it is more stable.

So ... a few more snags that I'd have hoped for (I didn't expect to have to rebuild the machine so soon ...), but a positive experience so far. Still enjoying the near-perfect multimedia experience; it is working better than any Linux distro I've ever used in that regard.

By the way, my box-rebuilding was much less painless that it could have been, due to having separate partitions for "/" and "/home". Highly recommended! Just remember to tell the Kubuntu installer not to reformat your /home partition when reinstalling (FYI, my fairly "loaded" Kubuntu box is currently using 3Gb on the root partition, just to give you a ballpark estimate of the space required.)

UPDATE (8/24): Just upgraded xserver-xorg-core and it works fine, even with NVIDIA drivers. Make sure you get at least version 1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4

I seem to be able to go 3-4 years with a Linux distribution before I get bored of it and switch to something else. I've been running Gentoo for a couple of years now, but I'm getting that "time to change distributions" feeling again, so I thought I'd write up how it goes. What follows is the results of about 3 weeks of installing, testing, installing, testing, etc., recent Linux distributions to try and find a compelling replacement for my current Gentoo desktop.

Instead of trying all 3000 distributions, I decided to start with the (supposed) best-of-breed, unscientifically chosen by looking at the current Top 3 on Distrowatch. As of today, those are: Ubuntu 6.06 (I used Kubuntu ), openSUSE 10.1 , and Fedora Core 5 .

I'm going into this expecting a lot: It was OK to have to do a lot of manual configuration with Gentoo, since that was the whole idea. However, I expect these "Top 3" distributions to do all the work for me. I expect them to be as point-and-click easy as possible, and will note anything that strays from that expectation.

The story begins here: Moving from Gentoo to SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora Core?

I am an avid Linux user, but there is one utility I've found that (almost, halfway) made me consider switching to Windows: WinSCP. A basic description of the program is that it lets you transfer files to/from a remote host over SFTP (secure FTP, along the same lines as SSH). There are many utilities that do this, but the ease of use of WinSCP really surprised me.

Lately, my favorite Linux live-cd is SLAX. I run Gentoo on my main system, but a live-cd is useful in a number of situations. I've used KNOPPIX in the past, but it is getting to be a little heavy for my tastes, with versions now taking up the better part of a DVD. SLAX is nice and small, just under 200Mb currently - quicker to download and burn in those "I need a live-cd NOW" situations. Since I'm more interested in having a toolkit that I can use in certain situations as the need arises, rather than a fullblown system for day to day use, the smaller live-cds fit my needs better.

Ironically, my primary use of Linux live-cds over the past few years has been as a tool to rescue Windows systems that have become unbootable, either from spyware/viruses, hardware failures (thanks Dell! Twice!), or random acts of Windows weirdness. In those sitations, I will boot from the SLAX CD, copy the Windows data across the network to my primary Linux box via samba, wipe the disk with dd (so the Windows installer doesn't try to "repair" the bad system), then rebuild and copy the data back over samba.

This weekend we decided to clear out a closet of old computers and donate them to charity. The problem was that most of them had been used in a family business and contained confidential client data that we didn't want to ship out to the world. Some of the machines were bootable, some were not, but clearly, booting into Windows and trying to delete the files from a running system was a bad idea (first, it is hard to know you've gotten everything, and secondly you can't wipe the entire system while it is running). So, time to boot into a SLAX live-cd.