Much to my disappointment my experience of Kubuntu was sort lived and rather painful. Everything had gone very well up until the updates had finished downloading. After restarting I could no longer connect to the net with my USB modem no matter what I tried. After deciding to go back to Ubuntu I made a mistake with the uninstall and broke the monkey!

So, no way to connect to the Internet a dead dragon and a broken monkey and all on a Friday night, well to some it might sound like a great start to the evening but for me I simply turned off and left alone…

…Sunday I decided to fix this mess. Since I only had an ‘Alternate CD’ I had no full version of Gutsy Gibbon so with the help (and VERY considerable patience) of my partner I downloaded from a mirror site via Ubuntu. Came home. Inserted CD, commenced install…oh wait…better just verify the CD integrity. What is this? 1 file has an error. Oh joy. So back on the motorcycle and downloaded another copy from a different mirror. Guess what? Same error. So after getting the second bad MD5 Checksum I decided to do the honourable thing and went to the Ubuntu Forums for some sage advice.

Sure enough it came. Use Torrent (I used bittorrent) to download a .torrent version of the Gutsy Gibbon .iso, this would compare both files and only download/fix the corrupted portions. Sure enough it fixed the problem in a matter of seconds. One 500Kb file was ruining it for the other 695MB, damn free-riders eh?

So home. Verified the CD integrity (again) commenced install. 30mins later I was staring at Ubuntu once again. The monkey was back. Then I wrote my wvdial.conf file for my 3G HUAWEI USB Modem and connected to the world wide web the first time. Then in came all the upgrade. Less then 2 hours later my updated and tweaked Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was as I remembered it.

…Or was it?

What is this? Sleek graphics, windows that wobble…and yes windows that explode into flames when closed

…and yes the cube!

All there, working perfectly, no jumping, no slow down, just perfect sleek compiz generated eye-candy. The monkey was back and better then ever. It seems that my fresh install of Ubuntu was better then my original upgrade. Returning all the sexy eye-candy that Feisty Fawn had given me.

So now things are better then ever. Who says a bit of eye-candy is not good for improving a relationship? In my case I could not be happier and with no hesitation I can say that this is truly the most versatile and impressive operating system out there today. So the dragon may be dead, but long live the monkey (well until April when the Heron arrives!).

Until then I stand by open source for the open minded and Ubuntu, Linux for human beings.