After a successful install of Kubuntu, I was not content to remain on the “stable” release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I have successfully been running off of the unstable release of Debian for over a year with very few problems.

As some of the programs I use on a regular basis have been updated since Dapper was frozen as a stable release, the best way to get them installed was to add Ubuntu Edgy Eft (the name of the unstable release) to my repositories and install. Everything was fine, so I just decided to go for the whole update and completely upgraded to Edgy. This was fine for about a week.

Unfortunately, I just updated some packages for Xorg without reading up on the changes first. It seems that with Xorg 7.1, the nVidia video card support has been lost. This has to do with the fact that nVidia’s proprietary drivers have yet to be updated to 7.1. As a result of that, text would disappear at random on the screen. This is no good for a computer you need to do work on. Trying to backout of the update did not have the desired results. Perhaps because I missed something, but I could not spend too much time fixing it, so I just went for a reinstall of Kubuntu. Easy enough. This time I watched the clock, and it took about 20 minutes to install kubuntu, then after installing I updated with all of the dapper updates, and programs I use not in the default install which took about 40 minutes to download.

Results: 1 hr of time to install and update Ubuntu, disk space taken up 2.8gb

Now 2.8gb seems like a lot of space, but one must remember, that this is not just an operating system. This is an operating system and all of the applications I use regularly, with a few games thrown in for fun. This go around I decided to repartition, and just give the operating system and applications 10gb to live in. At the moment I find this to be a reasonable size for an installation of linux, since even with all the development libraries I typically install for custom compilation of programs, I have yet to exceed 4.5gb of space.

Also, I should note that I have grabbed some programs from the Edgy repository, since I still require the newer versions, but I am just taking what I need and leaving the rest for the full stable release in October. Hopefully by then nVidia will have new drivers out.