Recently I became extremely frustrated with Gentoo. Something wasn't working and I didn't have the time, patience or desire to search (the always helpful) Gentoo Forums for the solution. That, combined with the seemingly never-ending syncs, updates, diffs, fix, break, rinse, repeat, were starting to drive me insane. I suppose doing the exact same thing at work all day doesn't help. Anyways, after successfully running Gentoo (always KDE) as a desktop PC for approximately two (2) years, I thought it might be time for a change.

Enter Kubuntu.

Initially, I was not aware that Ubuntu came with Gnome. Being a KDE user (I like eye-candy), I quickly found and installed Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE rather than Gnome). After a fairly slick and quick installation, and verifying five times that I didn't remove /dev/sda3 (mounted as /home with all my data), I rebooted and waited to bask in the glory that is Kubuntu. Unfortunately, the system had other plans.

Seeing as how I did not remove any content from my home partition, several hidden files and directories wreaked havoc on the Kubuntu installation. I also received various errors related to wacom, eraser and cursor which I later discovered did not matter. To correct these issues I attempted to move directories such as .kde and files such as .Xmodmap, .Xdefaults, .xessions, etc. to backup files and re-launching KDM, hoping that the files would be re-created with the Kubuntu default. Again, the system had different plans.

Enter Ubuntu.

Installation of Ubuntu was nearly identical to Kubuntu. The installation was seemless, flawless and within a few moments, I was staring a very nice looking Gnome desktop. From here I attempted to install kbuntu-desktop package so that I could switch between Gnome and KDE. After some fiddling and whatnot, I successfully had KDE running.

Now to make it all work with XGL which I'll discuss in a separate article.*



* The writing of this article was rudely interrupted by the main water pipe to the house breaking. My basement is now a hot-water swimming pool. Three good things came from this, 1) Somebody caught it in time, 2) I lost all interest in writing this and am going to bed and 3) I now have an indoor swimming pool. I suppose I won't have to force myself to goto the gym when I wake up in a few hours - the thought of a hot shower versus, well, no damned water, wins out in my books.