Live CD to the rescue?
As I shortly said in my last entry via text messaged email, my computer is very much unhappy. I was having a video error, so I decided to try restarting x but when I tried to log out of my KDE session, I ended up hanging somewhere after KDE stopped my session, but before I was handed back to the login screen. I'd had this problem before, so I just attempted power cycling my computer. While I know I shouldn't need to do this with a linux system, sometimes I don't know enough to try much anything else and can't exactly pull up help when the computer is hanging at a screen that doesn't even give me a command line. meh.
Right now I'm running the live CD that was the Fiesty Fawn install disk from a couple months ago. I am most annoyed as they only have KDE applications available on it, no Firefox or GAIM. Konqueror works fine as a file browser, and theoretically renders web standards very correctly, but in practice websites don't get designed with very standards correct html and css. While I hate this fact, using Firefox usually works pretty well because it does a good job handing the ass designs people put together, as well as being fairly close to standards compliant for the rare sites I run across that actually use standard complaint design. At least it will get me onto the Kubuntu Forums and access to Google in order to attempt to get help. The only way I got gmail working in this browser was to tell it not to send any sort of browser ID, as telling it to tell gmail it was Firefox 1.5 totally didn't work at all. Also, kopete didn't want to let me connect to google talk/jabber when I tried it the first time, but I'll give it another chance to try to connect now.
The problem seems to be xorg/KDE's screen settings. I've got a dual monitor set up, and KDE's been an ass about letting me configure the monitors since the last kubuntu release. Originally I assumed it was just my ineptitude that lead to the problem, and since it was just mildly annoying I lived with it until I could do a fresh install with the newest release. When the fresh install didn't correct the problem, and actually made it worse, I submitted a bug report to find that an assload of people were also having this problem. The frustrating thing seems to be that no one wants to actually release the fix to the repositories so that the problem can be resolved, even though the bug report thread actually says the problem has been fixed. After my first visit to the live CD I tried booting up with both kernels I have currently installed, as well as the recovery mode which just dumped me at a root prompt. I tried running update and upgrade on apt-get, finding nothing new to install/upgrade, but did find out why I was getting errors reported on a couple of mirrors when running updates in adept, apparently there's a problem with the public keys on the mirrors. I'll look into it when I get the rest of the system working again. I need to figure out how to run commands on my own box instead of just this little fluffy environment that the live CD provides, I don't want to have to reboot to get to a command line only to have to reboot again when I need more help.
Now that I've bitched about this here, back I go to the kubuntu forums to search for help and make a post to attempt to get someone's assistance. Wee. Also, I find it amusing as hell that Konqueror's spell check program doesn't recognize its own name, nor any of the other KDE applications I've listed in this entry.