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I made the switch to Kubuntu on my laptop sooner than I had originally planned. Hard drive failures have a way of accelerating change (back up your data!).

The only hiccup was that after installing 7.10 from a CD-ROM, I was asked to upgrade to 7.10 on restart, which was puzzling. The upgrade kept failing (adept_upgrade) until I properly configured my repositories (really just checking a bunch of boxes in adept_manager, which would have happened automatically if I had a live internet connection while installing from CD-ROM).

The “version” upgrade from 7.10 to 7.10 then went through fine. I’m guessing that any time the package manager needs to be patched, a similar version upgrade needs to be done, since the package manager is the core of a distribution.

The only down side is that I recently purchased the latest version of Quicken, which probably won’t run through Wine (though I haven’t tried it yet – at best it would be a huge hassle). On the plus side, Password Safe does run fine through Wine, so I didn’t lose any of my critical passwords.

UPDATE: Everything just works. I’ve tested Standby, Hibernate, the media buttons for volume, screen brightness, etc. They all work seamlessly. Best Linux distribution yet.

I finally figured out how to get Firefox to cooperate with the KDE sound system. All I had to do was find out where the Firefox binary was actually executed (this call isn’t easy to find unless you are familiar with browsing through shell scripts) and put artsdsp before the binary name. This is still black magic to me, but I suppose that artsdsp routes all sound device requests through the KDE sound system.

The critical section (in run-mozilla.sh):

##
## Run the program
##
artsdsp "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

Just one more example of how Linux is a power tool. Don’t mess with it unless you know what you are doing.