Ubuntu's alliterative naming has got so ridiculous now that I refuse to acknowledge its existence wherever possible.  Anyway, a new version appeared the other week, so I'm now running 9.10.

Newer KDE, so slightly shinier looking but a few new bugs too - my settings panel seems to lack the ability to turn the sound system off, so I get annoying little noises if I unplug the power cable.  grr. 
Also there's a lovely error about a missing lib if I want to change my window decorations.  It's not missing, I checked.  Ahh, maybe one day kde4 will be 100% usable

Last night I was fiddling around with other appearance settings - background effects, colour schemes, taskbar stuff.  At which point it randomly decided to crash a bit, and take my window decorations with it (ie the title bar, mix/max/close buttons, all that useful stuff).
They wouldn't come back either, leaving me with a particularly unusable desktop covered in windows I couldn't get rid of, and couldn't open any new ones over the top as the menus/taskbar had also died.

Luckily I have a 'backup' window manager installed, in the form of xfce.  That lasted all of a minute of trying to poke at kde's config files, and then oh dear, the entire of X fell over.

Argh.  So, command line it is... nothing doing with configs, so I figured go for some purging and reinstalling.  Which would have been fine, had apt not decided to get stuck complaining about missing package dependencies and then spitting out a lot of angry errors if I tried fixing that.

A lot of reboots and clearing of various caches and temp files and fiddling in recovery mode later, it's back to normal.  So that was one way of wasting an evening!

Fiddling with apt did at least mean I got round to finding the repo for amarok 1.4 - as 2 is the biggest pile of user unfriendly shit I've seen in a long time.  Which is a shame.

Oh yeah, and playing with CSS3 at work has led me to rediscover the joy of drop shadows. mmm.

tags: geeky linux