Finally, I switched to Kubuntu

At this time, I think there's no GNU/Linux distro that is more popular than the Ubuntu family (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu). Secrets behind this success may be the ease of use and installation (some said that even their grandmas can install Ubuntu), community support, fresh new stuffs in the repository as well as marketing. However, this episode is not a review because many blogs have done that already. It's just my experience about migration from another distro to Kubuntu.

My previous distro is PCLinuxOS. It's a great distro providing many great components, community support as well as many (somewhat) up to dated software repositories. However, I had messed it up trying to manually install a program that has a conflict with the installed version (okay, it's DBUS). After that, it lost its ability to detect newly attached hardwares. Moreover, I had a problem with Konqueror saying that it freezed repeatedly when trying to open some certain web pages, for examples, kde-look.org and some Thai homepages. I tried to find many solutions including upgrading KDE, changing fonts, disabling java, etc... but no luck at all. After screwing up PCLinuxOS, I decided to give Ubuntu family a try and chose Kubuntu because it use KDE as its desktop.

However, I took more than two days to migrate from PCLinuxOS to Kubuntu. Why? Firstly, because I chose to keep my old /home partition and use the same username as in PCLinuxOS. This caused some problems. KDE couldn't start at the first time because of the remaining settings in my old home directory. The solution was to remove all KDE related settings (.kde directory). Some applications couldn't run at first because of the same problem, therefore, I decided to remove all settings from my home directory T_T (my god, all of my bookmarks). Secondly, there were so many updates for the installed softwares at the time I installed Kubuntu. I had to download all of them and took more than half a day. It looks like a "fresh Windows installation nightmare". Thirdly, Kubuntu does not provide my everyday life programs out of the box, so that I had to apt-get all of them. I had built Bon Echo 2.0 beta2 on PCLinuxOS but it did not work on Kubuntu at first because it had no gtk2!!! Okay, I could apt-get it all, though it took me another day, no problem. Fourthly, it came to multimedia problems. As you know that Ubuntu family does not provide codecs for restricted formats such as mp3, wma, wmv, dvd and so on, so that you have to download and install these codecs yourself. However, it is easier using EasyUbuntu which will manage to download and install all codecs, plugins and many more you need to your box. Next, NTFS problem, I could mount my Windows partition but couldn't access it unless I am a root. The solution was to add

/dev/hda1 /media/windows 
ntfs noauto,user,exec,suid,nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0

to /etc/fstab. Also, I had a problem seeing files that their names are Thai characters in the NTFS partition. Actually, it's not a problem at all if Konqueror is set to use Thai font for icon or filename. Finally, language problem, there's no Thai kde-l10n in the repository so that Kubuntu cannot display Thai interface. I know, I know, it's my fault. So, please wait until KDE 4 is included to the repository ;).

After a few days of finding packages, apt-get and configuration, my Kubuntu laptop is fully equipped with my everyday programs, codecs, plugins, my favourite games and ready to work now. Hope that I will not screw it up again so soon.