And I'm back!

Well, that was pretty painless! The fonts in firefox are still different, (better!) but at least the anti-aliasing has come back! Everything else seems fine at the moment, and surprisingly enough, I haven't had to recompile any programs or drivers except the driver for my graphics card (NVIDIA). Actually, the whole system feels about twice as fast as it was before! I'm not sure if this is just because some old gunky programs that were hogging memory have been removed, or whether it is something to do with the kernel upgrade! I know the latest kernel has a new CPU scheduler, but I don't think Mandriva 2008.0 comes packaged with it. Generally, distributions don't like to use very new kernels, but prefer to wait until they've been tested a bit first in day to day use.

EDIT: I just checked, the kernel does include the new CPU scheduler, so this is quite likely the reason for the speed increase in day to day tasks...

The package manager (rpmdrake) which was rewritten recently has been vastly improved since the last release, as have all the other distro-specific tools and utilities, and feels pretty stable now, unlike before! I still managed to find a few bugs in the list display code when I first used it but hopefully they were just migration issues!

Mandriva 2008.0 comes packaged with what looks like a release candidate version of gcc and some other related system libraries, I'm not sure whether this is the case, and I have yet to try it, so here's hoping it's a suitable version, although I'm sure it is pretty much fine if it's a release candidate anyway! I'm missing being able to install beryl though, as compiz-fusion doesn't quite cut it yet, and it's got a lot of hard edges that beryl never had. This was one of the reasons I used beryl rather than compiz before anyway. Compiz always struck me as not being terribly user friendly, and some features which beryl had, especially in its configuration manager, were simply not present. Hopefully, these hard egdes will be smoothed over by the official release, but I can't help doubting this, with the track record of compiz in general.. :/

The only thing I have against upgrading right now, is the fact that a new release of kde is pretty iminent (the svn version is included already as rpms for those wanting to test), and I probably should have waited until it has been released and done it all in one go. On the other hand, it could have caused problems, so maybe it's just as well I do it in small chunks like this. I positively can't wait for kde4 as I'm beggining to feel a bit constrained with the current kde3 now, and also, amarok (my absolute favorite music player) is being rewritten as amarok2, which I'm excited about as well!

Anyway, now that my system is nice and shiny and working again, I'm gonna go and relax for a couple of days and try and get some college work done, which it is really vital I do before the end of the week. I just wish I had more time to use programming... Ah well...