Birthday et more

'tis my birthday today, it is.
22, and 14 years on from when I actually was 8, I don't feel a day over 8 years of age.
I get to pull off my favourite Halloween trick too.
See, they come a-calling, every year, the trick or treaters.
And I answer the door.
They say that inevitable phrase.
And I tell them, Sorry, I'm busy celebrating my birthday - come back next year.

Now, you'd think after 6 years of this, they'd finally catch on, but some of them still do it anyway. So I get my yearly fun.

AAAAnyway.

I upgraded my ailing ancient laptop to Ubuntu Karmic.
GNOME has ceased to work on it. KDE is it's salvation. Or it was.
After upgrading, I decided to tidy up, and remove some un-needed packages.
And now, once again, it's stuck at the command line, as KDM - like GDM, previously - fails to start.
What I would like, is a new laptop. One with a working USB, with inbuilt Wireless that linux can use without needing NDISWrapper, one that has it's own built in CD or even DVD drive.
What I have, is this laptop, which is almost dead, and is hiding some of my stuff that I *really* want back.
Except until someone tells me how to access a windows share via Samba on the command line, I'll never get them.
Oh, joy of joys.

In the breif time I had Karmic running though, I had some good first impressions on it. I'm a bit miffed that they've dropped support for GCC - the GNU Compiler Collection - since I use that a lot. A few other packages have conspicuously gone missing or changed, including one that now makes OpenTTD cease to function. However, a helpful person on the TT-Forums, with my aid, found the solution - simply install it from the Jaunty Repo.

In the breif time I was able to use KDE on there, I also had mixed impressions.
The bad ones are that it's slow, clunky, and I got lost in the KDE version of the Start Menu. However, the first two are most likely my laptop being ancient, and the last just being not used to it.
The good ones are that there's some pretty cool stuff in KDE, some nice KDM themes available for it on GNOME-look's cousin KDE-look, and a few things are actually easier.
I also like the plasmoid display. True, it took me a little while to figure it out, and I haven't had the chance to investigate much because my laptop complained if I had more than one plasmoid on screen, but it's got my interest.
I did note, that while my favourite terminal program Guake (Drop down Quake-like terminal for Gnome) has a KDE cousin, Yakuake, that Guake works just as well in KDE. So Yakuake (Or however it's spelled) can stay away for now.
However, I miss Gnomenu. I like Gnomenu. But I don't get Gnomenu. The KDE menu just isn't the same.

So overall - Karmic has a good rating from me, if you like Ubuntu or Jaunty, definatly upgrade - in a few days time though, so you don't get caught by the massive server overloads of people downloading it.
KDE also has a better rating in my books too now.

On a related note, I've been looking into BlackBox, and FluxBox. BlackBox for Windows (bb4win, and bblean) has managed to save me from a lot of getting annoyed at Windows when I'm forced to use it, but on Linux, I can't seem to get used to them. It has something to do with the fact I'm suspiciously missing anything resembling a notification area, that and gksu and kdesudo don't seem to work anymore.

Anyway, that's all from me. Rock on, and wish me a happy birthday, lest I visit curses up on you.