Kubuntu = figure four leg-lock
There was this guy named Art Harrison that I used to chum around with in the final days of highschool, and during the following year, who was notoriously skilled at putting people into the ‘figure four leg-lock’, a wrestling and grappling submission hold made famous in the 80’s by Ric Flair of the WWF. He did it to me once at a house party in the late 90s, and I shit you not, my right knee’s still funny when the barometric pressure drops.
Sunday I decided to attempt to install Kubuntu’s Edgy Eft Linux distro on a spare HDD on my XP server machine, thereby turning the machine into a dual-booting XP/Kubuntu wonder. I have to say, I’m filled with mixed feelings, and am somewhat skeptical about the legitimate user-friendliness of Kubuntu in general. The installation was painless, everything booted fine, the GRUB bootmanager detected my windows installation fine, and all was, generally speaking, good.
It went from good to horrible in about 30 seconds when I tried to reconfigure the screen resolution of my second monitor (my television, connected via s-video, to my radeon 9000). At first, the system dropped BOTH screens to the lowest possible resolution, 640×480, and then upon rebooting I discovered that the OS was no longer providing a video signal to my monitor that was acceptably within it’s scan range, leaving me with absolutely no way to use the system when booting into KDE.
Next, after booting into recovery mode and reconfiguring the xserver from the command line as per some instructions found on the ubuntu forums somewhere, I regained video functionality, but whenever I tried to log into KDE, I’d end up in a recursive loop of login screens, and never actually end up logged in. After 4 hours of mucking around and using every loud expletive in my vocabulary, and inventing some new ones, Kubuntu, purportedly the easiest of all linux distros, had put me directly into the figure four, and had me screaming for mercy.
I subsequently restored the windows MBR, got rid of Kubuntu, and am back to safe-happy-hold-my-hand operating system land. And I’m writing this from my Mac Pro, smug and confident in my knowlegde that the engine under the hood is incredibly powerful and sophisticated, but that I’m not going to get my fingers lopped off by a fanbelt - or by reconfiguring something as basic as my screen resolution.
