Kubuntu

We have a PC here that's been recently rejuvenated with a new motherboard, power supply, 1GB memory, a Pentium D, and most recently a SATA hard disk. The case is looking decidedly scruffy, but still perfectly functional. The on-off switch recently fell out, it had been sticking a bit, but it has since succumbed to fatigue and gone the way of most old plastic. Poking your finger into the hole in the front of the case doesn't feel very high tech, but it works, and there's no danger. Anyway. I'm not convinced it ever had a pukka copy of Windows on it. My wife bought it donkey's years ago. It had Windows 98 on it when I first saw it. Recently it's been running a copy of XP Professional that a shop gave me. Yes! Gave me. In Malaysia, computer shops "don't sell software". That's what the shop told me. I suspect if I hadn't just bought a lot of hardware too, they might have charged me a few ringgit.

The PC has been slow / failing to shut down recently. I suspect one of the hard disks is failing, but not sure how that causes the symptom. The new SATA disk was bought for a fresh installation of ... something. I'm fed up with pirated Windows software - keeping it up to date seems like a good idea, and the Windows Genuine Advantage program worked for us: we decided if we wanted to use Windows, we'd buy it. So we looked at the price, and decided we didn't want it that much. I use slackware on my desktop and laptop, but impress no-one with my choice of xdm (What? I just want to type in my username and password - what do I need pictures and animated menus for?), and icewm with a black desktop. It works, and it's fast. OK, so sometimes I spend a lot of time editing text files to get things working. For me, it's not an issue - most of my jobs have been like that! My wife wants something that JustWorks(TM), so I had a look for a Linux that JustWorks(TM).

Searching the net brought me to Kubuntu so I downloaded the install CD ISO, and started this morning. It's mid afternoon now and I'm not happy. This morning, I was dancing for joy. So pretty! And quick. The install CD boots to a fully working Kubuntu system without actually installing. Install is a shiny big icon on the lovely desktop that gave me a peaceful feeling. The installation is swift too, and there was very little for me to do, beyond selecting a time zone. There was a "scanning the mirror" message at one point that really didn't seem to be doing much. That prompted a web search, and lots of other people had been annoyed by it too. I waited it out, and it finally went away and appeared to complete successfully. Oh, one annoyance was a badly laid out partition editing dialog. Some of the controls were obscured by other controls. I should have taken a picture, obviously.

It doesn't work!

Then the pain started. I just wanted to install firefox. I like it. My wife likes it. Could I? No. The software updating / management feature of kubuntu (one of the reasons I chose it) didn't work. It was nice, said I had some sort of firefox installed at first, but not a complete installation, and I certaily couldn't find any way of starting anything that looked like firefox. I could delete the bits that were there though, that felt like progress, in a funny sort of a way. Kubuntu seems to do a lot for the user. When I stop wanting to do what I want to do and start wanting to do what Kubuntu thinks is the RightThingToDo(TM), then I'll have a much better time I think. I'm blaming Kubuntu now, but as time wore on, I realised I might not be being fair.

I opened a konsole. It looked just like an xterm to me, which struck me as a very good thing. I tried apt-get. It fails, in a similar way to the Adept (!) application that does the same thing, but it told me why. It couldn't fetch whatever these things fetch from one of the places these things fetch whatever they fetch, and it implied the place it was trying to fetch ... from had an IP address of 1.0.0.0. Brilliant! That doesn't look like Kubuntu's problem at all! A quick google, and I could see people were trying acts of desperation like using their ISP's DNS instead of their router's DNS. Madness! DNS works perfectly well on the router - everything else (surfing, pinging) works a treat.

I don't know what the real problem is. I've seen forums where the suggestion is that it's a bad interaction between IPv6 on their PC and the software on their router. I'm off to update the firmware on my router, and if that works, I'll let you know. If it doesn't, well, I'll have to thinmk of something, won't I?