Yet more changes

Well, spent ages last night trying to get the volume to increase and decrease using the function key on my laptop with the appropriate up and down keys.
Despite being fairly familiar with Linux, I ended up very cheesed off with the things! I got the keycodes from xev, then tried an old trick I used in KDE 3 back in the day - basically setting up a shell script and assigning those keycodes to an unused F key etc (if desperate, you can find it on my main website somewhere - but ask and I will link to it). No joy.
This morning, I discovered that PCLOS 2010.11 in its Gnome incarnation doesn't actually have a functional way to format/partition drives. No fdisk, no cfdisk - even GParted, which is included on the GUI menu doesn't work! Arrrggggh!

In the end, I decided to install the KDE version. Yes, I know I have moaned about KDE4 but I reasoned it is likely to be more stable/featured in PCLOS as it is the default.
So, having a 2010.7 disk lying around, I installed that. Seemed good, so I went to update the system and found that it wanted to install nearly 800megs of updates! The new 2010.10 version is not even 700 meg, so I thought I might as well simply download that, install it and then update from there.
Currently downloading.... but with my crap internet, it will be some time yet!

Whilst waiting, I have been trying out a few of the problem areas with the Gnome version to see if the KDE one has problems. Scrolling with the touchpad button - fine! Partitioning tools - yep. Function button and sound up and down - whooo, working fine! And no stupid warnings about my battery which I *know* is old and doesn't hold a charge etc so why tell me?

Part of me is quite excited to be back with KDE - I loved Konqueror as my file manager and used it as a browser most of the time. I know that Dolphin is the default these days, but I am old and prefer what I am used to.
Again, the mail client is that awful Thunderbird, but I will see what it entails to get KMail back - I like Kmail!
And of course, KDE has the best burning software of the lot - K3b. Better than any of the other Linux burning tools and, IMHO, better than Nero etc on Windows.

I still think the move to KDE4 was a mistake by the KDE team, but it does seem to have matured a bit since the first version, which was really dreadful and crashed constantly.

Will blog some more about this PCLOS KDE version once I have the latest version installed and up to date.