Last weekend i installed Kubuntu Linux 5.10. And deleted it. Here’s why. Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux (Kubuntu is the KDE flavour or Ubuntu) 5.10 was released on Thursday the 13^th, clogging the ubuntusphere, and of course i was among the ones to torrent the installation ISO on first night. After all, my home installation of Mepis had gone bad by too much of uncontrolled tweaking and i wanted my box updated with the latest and greates of all things Linux. Plus i like the Ubuntu philosophy, and Mark Shuttleworth seems like a nifty person (i listened to him at Debconf⁵ a few months back). I have mixed feelings. Ubu 5.10 is supposed to have work on a great OOBE (out of the box experience). The installer was nice and friendly (and text-based, which some have critizised, but i’m fine with it and it saves some disk space for better use) and only had one place where you could go really wrong. I tried to emulate the "normal user" by pressing the default no when asked whether i’d really want to repartition and erase all of my installation disk. After that, the logic lost its track and i decided to reboot myself into smoothness. Anyways, i was presented with a very nice and slick KDE 3.4 and for the first time i get X with 1280×960x24 out of the box on my old and rather outdated computer. Nifty. But: Ubu did not care about my external firewire disk, nor my wife’s iPod, also connected through Firewire — oddly enough, the installer did see them and gave me the option to install Kubuntu over her music collection if i so wished :). There is a disk tool to add mounts to the system and it worked once. One sysadmin philosophy, which some must have problems with, is that you do not log on as root and do your administration, but rather log in as yourself and sudo your deeds. The first switch to "administrator mode" went fine but while my ext3rnal hard disk showed up fine, the fat iPod did not. To make things worse, when i used amaroK, a music player i absolutely like, to compile my pretty extensive collection of music from my external disk, and had the nerve to actually play stuff from it too, Ubuntu crashed. And when i was watching a video of something and banged on arrow-right too many times to get to the point at ten minutes into the clip, it crashed. And when i rebooted with my seven-in-one card reader attached to USB, my SD card suddenly was where my firewire disk was, and the disk tool refused to let me in as administrator anymore. I’ve read about the possibility to mount disks by label or UUID rather than device id, but i’m not that leet yet, only annoyed. For kubuntu also didn’t have an mp3 encoder/decoder installed. At that time, i politely said "I’ll be back" and took out my old Mepis 3.3.x install CD instead. And it’s still installing updates… I seriously hope i can get a working Kubuntu on my computer. I would like to be on the Ubuntu train, i would like to have a supposedly well-oiled Linux on my box, and i want to use KDE. I’ll give Mark another month and try again later.