I have to confess a serious case of love-hate relationship with Ubuntu. The more I get suspicious about it and its makers, the more gracefully it runs on all my hardware. I think it does that on purpose. Just like last time, when I upgraded from 7.04 to 8.04, I was secretly hoping the upgrade would leave me with a heap of smoking ashes. And, just like last time, the process went as smooth as silk.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by KDE 4.1. I didn’t like, or even understand, most of what I saw of the first dot zero releases, but I sure like what I see now. Of course there is a lot of eye candy, which I don’t care about in the slightest as long as I can disable it (I can’t afford it on my relatively slow hardware, and losing cycles for no good reason tends to bother me anyway in the long run). But it feels like there also is a lot of sensible stuff behind the scenes. I’m still playing around, but most of what I’ve seen has been improved. I always thought KDE was a terrific piece of software; this new release surely carries on the good tradition and probably ups the ante.

Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t had my little problems. The Alt+F2 thingie that used to be called MiniCLI has now been replaced by this wonderful new thing called KRunner. I like it very much, but it seems to have a nasty bug, it does not store settings nor the command history. This is a big pain, since I use the thing a lot. I see the bug has been fixed in SVN, I hope the fix gets to binary soon.

Also, VLC video output defaults to XVideo extension, which seems to cause a major screwup with my graphics card (Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02), xserver-xorg-video-intel X.Org video driver, version 2.4.1 whatnot). After a handful of seconds of video play, the display goes completely berserk and there is no way to get anything back but doing the Three-Finger Salute. Forcing VLC video output to OpenGL fixed the problem. And by the way, VLC 0.9.4 totally rocks.

I had to uninstall NetworkManager since it messed with my wireless card and my own scripts. OK, I have to be honest here: me and NetworkManager, we don’t get along very well. I don’t like it and the feeling seems to be mutual. No big deal, I can’t be friends with anyone, can I.