patched-up: FINALLY

So I finally got down to trying out the new Kubuntu 9.10 as mentioned here.. and I'm proud to say that this post comes from the penguin partition of my computer..

First thing that hits me is that the eye candies and everything still stays.. and of course, there's the big fix: Everything simply works out-of-the-box. The previous version of kubuntu (9.04) was merely a lame excuse. Everything from the wlan to file managers were broken. And the thing is, the fellas back there KNEW that it was broken.. they just decided to somehow release it anyway.

So with this new version, the eye candy that was there before still remains.. the awesomely straightforward interface still stays.. with the addition now that everything works by itself. Not so much of any tweaking needs to be done. Heck, I didn't even update any of the 34 'bug fixes' that they prompted me to.. the wlan connector works like a breeze, there's even a in-built firefox installer.. so you don't exactly need to open up the console and start unpacking the packages and 'apt-get' the stuffs..

Medias play fine now too.. perhaps it's the new update with VLC but if I'm not wrong, I'm using a slightly older version, cos I simply went to do a 'sudo apt-get install vlc'.. so I got a slightly older version; but still, it works.

Mounting of other partitions are a breeze too.. previously I recall having to go through the console just to mount my partitions, and so I ended up writing a script to automate the process.. but now, it's all straight forward. Just click on the partition in the file manager, and it auto-magically mounts the partition and shows u the content. As I'm typing this, I'm listening to music that's from my ntfs partition.. once you're done and wish to unmount it, again, just simply right-click and choose the 'unmount' function. Sweet.. =)

Perhaps the only downside to it is hotmail. Which technically goes back one big round and points the problem back to microsoft. You see.. apparently there's some nonsense stunt that micro$oft's trying to pull. They've added some codes such that when u're using firefox over a linux platform, hotmail will know abt it. And so they'll disable the 'Compose' function.

Sure, you'll get through to the Compose page.. you can fill in the address To and CC fields.. and the Subject too. But that's abt all you're gonna be able to do. The main body where ur text will be is greyed out. You can't seem to 'reach' it or 'enable' it.. so in short, you can't send any mails out.

So clever right? Sneaky bastards. They may claim that it's a firefox compatibility issue but really.. you own Hotmail, you create Internet Explorer and you started Windows.. and somehow, things don't work out when I don't use any of these 3 together.. isn't it obvious that u're trying to control the market?

So anyway after digging around the forums I managed to solve it with this nifty little firefox add-on known as User Agent Switcher. I'm not all too sure what it does and I honestly can't be bothered to find out.. I just know that it works probably by mimicking some background codes. So hotmail somehow 'thinks' it's on a windows platform, and allows everything to proceed as normal.

Well, other than this issue with the hotmail thing, which really isn't a linux problem.. this is by far the best distro I've used ever.. well done to the chaps behind Kubuntu.. *thumbs up*

Looks like my XP partition will be collecting dust for a looong while now.. =)