So, once again out of a general boredom and desire to up my geekness to the bleeding new shit, I installed Kubuntu Edgy-Eft knot 2. Not even an alpha release. I feel risky, what can I say…I wore a condom.

Of course, my initial upgrade via source list completely fucked my system leaving me unable to boot any kernel. I seem to always have that luck whenever trying to finagle a dist-upgrade. Luckily, I’ve a habit of backing my shit up before doing risky shit like this, so I was cool. I downloaded an ISO and burned a CD on my laptop, wiped my desktop’s Linux partition and reinstalled. The disk install worked fine, booting like a live cd and giving me a little icon to click on the desktop to do an actual disk install. The new installer is fancier than ever and I was up and running in a couple glasses of wine and a nervous cigarette or two.

Now at this point, Edgy isn’t even in alpha release stage, so yeah, I’ve got a few problems. My computer is pretty cranky about shutting down and I can’t boot the 2.6.17 kernel, having to use the previous one for now—not a big deal. Some programs I use haven’t made it to the Edgy repositories yet, but again, I always have my laptop. The point is, I wanted something new and was willing to make a few sacrifices in exchange.

Buggy situations aside, Kubuntu Edgy is really pretty damn cool. Amarok (no more capital K) 1.4.3 prompted me as to whether I wanted to install support for MP3 the first time i tried playing a song and when I clicked yes, jumped to an abbreviated version of the package manager (Adept) and enabled some repositories and installed the packages. All in one click. pretty cool. It didn’t work (Hey, it’s still in heavy development—what do you expect?), but after adding the multiverse repositories to my source list manually and running an update, new versions of the codecs were found, updated and I now have that good old eardrum-busting Norwegian Black Metal screeching out the speakers. I’ll save video codecs for another day.

Firefox 2.0 Beta or “Bon Echo” is in the Edgy repos, which made me very happy as I’m running it at work on OSX and have become quite used to the spell checking and other features.

KDE 3.5.4 is pretty cool, complete with all kinds of new little tweaks and updated applications. I’d actually upgraded Dapper to 3.5.4 about a week ago, but with Edgy, everything fits smoother and looks nicer. Kate now has built-in terminal access, which is pretty cool. the new Kopete is much flashier as well.

Running such an early version, I’m going to hold off trying to set up the whole Compiz/XGL business till later, but I did manage to easily install drivers for my graphics card and enable compositing. I now have some pretty sweet window transparency.

All in all, I’m more than psyched about Edgy-Eft. It’s looking to be pretty fucking hardcore. I can’t wait to see the final product.

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