I received my Ubuntu and Kubuntu Shipit CDs a few days ago.My last experience of upgrading Ubuntu was terrible and basically I had to remove all KDE packages to install new Ubuntu ones and eventually I ended up with broken dependencies.I tried Kubuntu 8.04 also and it was disastrous.This time I decided to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 as my packages were very outdated as nobody uses Ubuntu in my house except me.So when I'm in Bhopal,nobody downloads updates.

So I proceeded with the fresh installation of Ubuntu.The installation proceeded smoothly till it was about 94 to 96% complete.Then all of a sudden Ubiquity crashed while installing GRUB.I tried installing again and ubiquity crashed again.I used the CDs feature and checked it for defects.The test didn't find any defect in the CD.

I then tried to install Ubuntu without installing GRUB Boot loader.The install was successful but I didn't have GRUB to boot into it.I tried installing GRUB manually using some old kernel modules and files and managed to boot Ubuntu 8.10.I felt something wrong with the installation and then Ubuntu 8.10 was on its way out of my PC.

I though about getting another CD or using other distros like Mandriva,Open SuSe,Linux Mint or Fedora but decided to check out Kubuntu 8.10 once as it uses KDE 4.1 and I hadn't tried KDE 4 yet.I also thought of it as a way to confirm that something was wrong with my ubuntu CD and not with my PC.The Kubuntu installation was very smooth and GRUB was successfully installed this time.I like the new version of GRUB in which uuid is used in place of the root line in menu.lst.Its very useful if you partition your had disk quite often.

I booted up Kubuntu 8.10 with absolutely no expectations.But KDE 4.1 impressed me and unexpectedly its integration in Kubuntu was also pretty good.Although Kubuntu 8.10 is just Ubuntu+KDE 4.1 like all previous versions of Kubuntu,KDE 4.1 is so good that I don't care about anything else.The desktop widgets are really nice,specially KDE twitter which is a Twitter client.

Although KDE 4 is great,I'm very comfortable with GNOME applications and don't want to spend too much time finding my way around KDE applications.Thus I decided to install GNOME to help me in my experience of learning KDE.I always like to have both GNOME and KDE installed as I can use the suitable desktop environment according to the situation and my mood.So I installed the ubuntu-desktop package to download GNOME and all the default GNOME applications.I prefer opening the terminal and typing

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

It's much faster than using the GUI and is gives a clearer view of the installation process.You can refer to my post on Using Multiple Desktop Environments to install GNOME/KDE/Xfce.

I'm currently downloading the restricted extras and latest software updates after which I'll be back to my normal routine.For the past few days all I've been doing is installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu and downloading related stuff.