Day 0

With Kubuntu 7.04 on the (metaphorical) shelves, I've run out of both excuses and time. It got installed on the laptop this weekend, and tomorrow, I take it to work.

And use it.

I've tried to pre-empt as much of the pain as I can by installing goodies I know will be necessary, and setting up the preinstalled ones in intelligent (my word; others might use "stupid") ways. A short and probably incomplete (it's late) list reads:

• Installed Firefox (2.0.0.3), bookmarked my del.icio.us and Google Reader pages. Visited a couple of pages and installed all the missing plugins I could find.
  
• Installed Thunderbird (manually, since the 7.04 repositories missed 2.0.0.0 being released by about a day; nnngh), set up work and GMail pop accounts, copied mailboxes from XP partition to local dir, aimed Tbird at them. Couldn't get the Tbird icon on the panel menu to look like the Tbird icon. Found a default emaily icon from KDE's set instead. Bah.
• Created a "My Documents" in the home dir. Copied some of my work and day-to-day junk across from the XP partition. Kubuntu at least automounts that partition whenever it boots, so it's there if I need to get at it.
  
• Set up Kopete to talk to my GTalk IM account. Messed around with some formatting and layout until it fairly closely resembled the GTalk client. Kopete-Pidgin interactions seem to generate spurious amounts of whitespace for the Pidgin user, although Kopete-anything else seems to be fine.
  
• Installed Automatix2 (oh thank god for Automatix). Used it to install a bunch of audio and video codecs, VLC media player, WINE, Acrobat, Google Earth, and Picasa. Google Earth installer made a dog's breakfast of my home directory because I wasn't paying attention when it asked me what files it should be putting where. Poop. At least it runs; I'll fix it later.
  
• Installed NTLMAPS. This'll be needed at work. More tomorrow.
• Installed Samba client/server. Ditto. Ditto.
  
• Foobed around with several file managers (Dolphin, Konqueror, and some ghastly other one whose name I can't even remember any more). Konqueror was the most clunky to set up, but seems the best laid-out and most useful when done. Created a shortcut to launch it with a modified file management profile, and dumped the others.
• Installed Beryl, just for kicks. Turned it on. Ogled the eye candy. Turned it off again, when it became clear it was flattening my system like a big fat man jumping off the Empire State building.
  
• Pointed amaroK at my MP3 collection on the XP partition, which worked magnificently (even downloaded album art automatically; take that, iTunes). Tried to get it to play nicely with my iPod Nano. Pain. More on this tomorrow, or whenever I have free time to resume banging my head against a brick wall.

That's it for now; I'm going to bed. Tomorrow the fun starts.