Staying with Hardy

[Neil Winchurst]

A liitle while ago I decided to move from Edgy Kubuntu to a more up to 
date version. I did a backup of Edgy and then a new install of Gutsy. A 
little tweaking was needed but it all went very well. Meanwhile I had 
read plenty of praise for Hardy and I had the CD's so a while later I 
installed Hardy as a dual boot with Gutsy. So some first impressions.

I made a few changes.

I sorted out the NumLock  problem. That is, I set it to switch NumLock 
on automatically, then found that the  light did not show the correct 
state of the set-up. The light was off when NumLock was on and vice 
versa. A search in Google showed that this was a known problem and also 
showed me how to sort it out.

I prefer to double click the mouse to launch a program so I changed that 
too.

I installed Firefox (version 2) and Thunderbird. I do not like kmail for 
email nor konqueror as a browser.

I installed the Gimp.

I set konqueror to be the default file manager, as I do not like Dolphin.

I installed GnuCash.

I use floppies for small backups. Yes, I know, still in the stone age, 
but I find them useful to backup my accounts in GnuCash. When I tried to 
use them in Hardy there were some problems which I eventually tracked 
down to an error in the relevant line in fstab.

The install had not found my printer properly so I added my printer and 
made it the default.

I added some more programs which I like, eg Opera, Scribus, Abiword, 
Krusader, Kexi.

Now it all seems to be going along nicely thank you.

So my comments ...

all this tweaking was simple enough for me, and I do not consider myself 
to be an expert at all. However, a newbie would get a bit lost I suggest.

I chose version two of Firefox because I have read that there are still 
some problems with version three.

I avoided KDE4 due to all the problems I read about in this list.

I am not considering Intrepid at all as an upgrade after reading about 
so many people who are having difficulties with it, especially KDE4. I 
also do not like the idea of being forced to use Dolphin instead of 
Konqueror. I thought that personal choice was one of the main reasons 
for using Linux.

So, I am happy so far with Hardy (Kubuntu)  and I expect to stay with it 
for a long time to come. If it ain't broke ........

Neil Winchurst