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And now, the first episode in our brand new series entitled “Articles on Wikipedia in need of a German translation”: Piano wire.

If you decide to upgrade your Kubuntu—or Ubuntu or any freaking buntu—edgy to feisty, you should prepare for some unforeseen circumstances. But don’t worry, I’m here to help you foresee.
First off, I’m all for streamlining the update process, and it’s nice of them to create a graphical upgrade tool, but it wasn’t very helpful. I followed the instructions to the point where the upgrade progress dialog was supposed to show up, and … Well, CPU usage spiked for a couple of minutes, because of a Python script that was running, but nothing came up. I killed it, hoping my system wasn’t messed up already, and, luckily, everything was still fine. I then proceeded to use the old—and now, sadly, undocumented—upgrade method: replace every occurrence of edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list with feisty and ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and apt-get -f install. To make matters worse, Apache 2 caused some dependency problems, so I temporarily uninstalled it. Other than that, everything downloaded and installed pretty smoothly, apart from mdadm nagging about the absence of RAID arrays over and over; I ignored the warnings, as my notebook only has a PATA hard drive. The SCSI subsystem seems somewhat broken though.
I then proceeded to reboot my system. Lo and behold, it didn’t work. Apparently, they decided to quietly move to a more rigorous device naming scheme for HAL, and /etc/fstab wasn’t updated properly. The result? My /usr/lib and /usr/share device names didn’t exist and the—now non-verbose!—boot process failed with a bunch of errors, kicking me to the “emergency shell”. Granted, that allowed me to investigate the problem. A quick look inside /dev/disk/by-uuid helped me repair fstab and I was back on track.
The first thing I noticed when KDM had started up was the new theme, called “Polyester”. I don’t like it. The contrast on widgets is too high and I don’t care for the fade effects at all. Hence, after logging in, I switched back to my preferred “Plastik” (with the “Lipstik Standard” color theme) and also updated KDM’s settings to make it use the same style.
The next problem at hand was the realization that NetworkManager, or at least the version of KNetworkManager that ships with Feisty, isn’t as useful as its developers are ambitious. There’s no support for WPA and it never tells you what it’s doing. Since I use WPA2, I didn’t bother to look into it any further and uninstalled it. The old method where you just edit /etc/network/interfaces still works, and, actually, I’m under the impression that associating with my access point happens a lot faster now. One thing I did have to do was remove the wpa-conf managed the file had. I think I copied it from that forum thread, but it turned out to be both incorrect and superfluous.
Other than that, Feisty isn’t much of a shocker. The main reason why I upgraded is so I could keep using recent packages. There are a couple of visual improvements and my system seems slightly more responsive, but it doesn’t strike me as much of an upgrade. Judging by the problems I just described, I still think the predictable release cycle isn’t worth much. It’s proactive nonsense. If your product isn’t ready, you postpone it. Windows Vista isn’t the best example, but at least they had the courage to admit their goals were further away than they thought, rather than deciding to drop everything just so they could release within a timeframe they set ages ago. Just my two cents, obviously.
If you do decide to get Feisty, once you’ve ironed out the kinks, you’ll end up with a stable and nice Linux-based desktop operating system. Unfortunately, as with any Linux distribution, those very kinks are no doubt still plentiful.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Back when Kubuntu Edgy came out, I upgraded Dapper on my notebook—using apt-get, like they recommend—and things went haywire. That is to say, apart from dependency trouble and some minor issues, for some reason, my fan would turn on and off every second or so. Every time the CPU temperature reached 60 °C, it would turn on momentarily, causing the temperature to drop below 60 immediately, which would turn off the fan, only to have it reach 60 again after a short while, at which point the process would repeat itself. I was certain this wasn’t doing my hardware any good, so I didn’t want to mess around looking for a solution, and decided to reinstall Dapper. I’m still not sure how all this was even possible, since I thought these things were controlled by the BIOS or fan controller firmware or whatever, but there you go.
However, even though Dapper is dubbed “Long Time Support”, you end up with ridiculously outdated packages—I like to call that “the Debian way”. Hence, I decided to give it another try today. This time, I downloaded the live CD and booted it, and messed about a little to see what would happen with my fan. Much to my surprise, it was fine, so I proceeded to take the aforementioned upgrade path again, and, even more to my surprise, I’m now on Edgy and I have yet to find something that broke during the upgrade.
Next steps include upgrading KDE and Amarok individually. If anything goes wrong, you’ll be the first to hear.

As you are all hanging on my every word, you obviously use a feed reader to keep up with my ramblings. Thus, I would like to use this opportunity to announce my switch to FeedBurner, which will reduce my bandwidth usage, as well as allow me to get some useful statistics about my feed. Migration should be painless—the old feed URL should automatically redirect your feed reader to the new FeedBurner one. I can’t wait to see some stats.

Well, as if I didn’t have enough on my mind already, my desktop PC died tonight. I’m guessing either the power supply or the motherboard crapped out, and hoping it’s the former. If I’m lucky—that’s a big “if”—, I’ll have it back on Tuesday. I guess I’ll have to study this weekend, as there isn’t anything else to do now.

My blog is now Pingback-enabled. Feel free to try it out by linking to one of my posts from your own Pingback-enabled blog. Hopefully, it’ll work.

One thing I like about KDE—and I’m told Gnome also has it—is the ability to enter almost any special character by combining keys; for instance, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C will get you a copyright sign. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was Mac OS that first had it, since I seem to remember experimenting with it under Mac OS 7. Anyway, surely there’s a way to get the same functionality on Windows XP? The trouble is, what Google query would one enter to find such a utility?

Incidentally, I added a spectrum analyzer-style post frequency chart to my archives. It’s blasphemy as far as the Semantic Web goes, but you can’t have it all.
Update: Actually, some DOM manipulation did the trick. Semantics ftw.