The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

The latest release of the popular Ubuntu distribution of Linux is 6.10, a.k.a. Edgy Eft, a decedent of Dapper Drake and, before that, Breezy Badger. The next release will be Feisty Fawn. Badger, drake, fawn…what the crap is an eft? A young newt, it turns out.

It took a little while to get Edgy up and running when it should have been simple. I performed a dist-upgrade from Dapper, but had issues with a number of packages–all KDE-related, incidentally–which left the condition of my apt repository questionable. Fortunately, some dpkg --remove and apt-get -f install magic allowed me to complete the installation and eventually re-install the troubled packages. However, a more novice user who happened to prefer KDE to GNOME would probably not have been able to hack around the issues, so, for the time being, Ubuntu is not yet your grandmother’s Linux.

The other issue I had when upgrading is that my KDE keyboard shortcuts were reset. Simply put, this sucks. I don’t even know how many shortcuts I had configured–they’re the same combinations I was using in BlackBox, WindowMaker, SawFish, Enlightenment, and whatever other window managers I’ve used over the years–and I’ll have no idea which ones I haven’t reprogrammed until I try to use them. Boo-erns. Fortunately most of my other KDE-related settings weren’t steamrolled in the upgrade process.
Upgrading issues aside, it looks pretty nice so far. It comes with Firefox 2.0, KDE 3.5.5, Amarok 1.4.3, Gaim 2.0beta3.1, etc. Basically a lot of bleeding-edge stuff, which somewhat alleviates my need to have a bunch installed in userspace (and more than enough to give Chet the willies). I wouldn’t recommend it for a casual Linux user, but I’d definitely recommend Dapper over Edgy for the developer/hacker type.