I upgraded my desktop box from Ubuntu Jaunty to Kubuntu Karmic today as well, since I find the latter’s advantages over the former outweighing its disadvantages. Among the advantages are the standard availability of Firefox 3.5, the out of the box working of sound (no hassle with sound systems this time), and faster booting up. Also, KDE is just way cooler than Gnome.

I still have a few minor complaints about the installation though. While it looks nice, it’s bloody slow, which is especially annoying when entering text or configuring partitions. Secondly, the keyboard layout configuration won’t let you try out your selection any more, but instead shows a diagrammatic picture of the chosen layout, which was in my case not even correct.

Also, at the summary screen, the last chance to bail out,  I got no indication that the installation program  was aware of my Windows XP installation. Luckily, it was, and an entry to boot into it appeared in the Grub menu after I rebooted.

The newest nvidia driver doesn’t seem to have any problems on this computer, but when configuring my dual screen setup using nvidia-settings, that particular tool appeared unable to parse the config file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After taking a look at it, it looked like some sort of rudimentary version and after some Googling around, it seems like configuration of the X server is done automagically using dbus now. Which screws up. I did find a work-around that works nicely though. The trick is creating a fresh xorg.conf and putting it in the default location. Apparently, Xorg doesn’t ignore it (yet). Here’s how:

 # sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.karmic
 # sudo nvidia-xconfig
 # kdesudo nvidia-settings

After this, I had a fresh and nicely working Kubuntu desktop. My usual post-installation command did the rest:

# sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk vim kubuntu-restricted-extras build-essential
subversion mysql-server openssh-server mplayer-nogui mencoder gqview gimp
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