Back online

Well, after some digging around I've gone with PCLinuxOS. Flightgear and Google Chrome are available on this. It's significantly faster than Fedora, even though I've switched back to a 32 bit OS (from x86_64). I'd previously installed PCLinuxOS on my daughter's laptop and been impressed with the results.

I've gone with larger fonts (must be getting older) than I had befoe - which combined with the bright colours of KDE makes it a bit cutesy - especially with the MacOS type window decorations.

Kmail still uses Akonadi - but unlike on Fedora, it's not using a mysql backend - and its not maxing out one the CPUs. Still has quite a big footprint - but again no apparent way to switch it off.

I fired up Thunderbird and added the ExportImportTools extension. This still does not support Maildirs - but it was simple to export my mailboxes from kmail and import tham in Thunderbird. The latter integrates rather well with KDE, but it is a bit ugly (unfortunately there are very few themes currently available for v11).

BTW for anyone else wanting to export a mailbox file from kmail...although there are some scripts out there on the internet to do this, if you've got a running kmail installation, all you need to do is select the emails, right click and 'save as...' to export a mailbox format file.

So I'll continue looking for an email client which supports multiple identities / SMTP and POP servers, is lighweight and not ugly. I suspect I'm going to have to wait for a nice Thunderbird theme. I suppose I could write one.....no, I've got enough half-baked projects for the time being.

What were they thinking

My home computer is a gateway to my data (and stuff other people have shared). So the number of X applications I use is short - OpenOffice, Firefox, kmail and konsole, occassionally xrdp and vnc. So I don't upgrade it very often. The last time was when Fedora 9 was shiny and new.

But I wanted to install Flightgear for my son. Rather than go through all the hassle of trying to build it myself, I thought I'd just use binary packages - but none available for Fedora 9. Since it has been a while since I upgraded my operating system I thought I'd just bite the bullet and upgrade to the current Fedora release (16).

A bit of googling and I read about pre-upgrade - this seems like an easy way to upgrade. How wrong was I. It downloaded lots of stuff then rebooted into Anaconda - then stopped - "What type ofmedia contains the installation tree?" - my hard disk. Which hard disk? Again not a problem. What's the path? more reboots and googling and I had a path. Path is invalid. So then I cleaned up all the mess preupgrade had left behind on my disk and tried to upgrade using a CD. You can't upgrade from a CD. Eventually I found the installation DVD iso. Burned a copy and rebooted. "You can only upgrade from the previous 2 releases of fedora". Grrrr!

Time for bed.

Next day. My /home is on a seperate partition and fortunately I had plenty of spare disk. It has been runing on reiserfs for the past 10 years or so - so I created a copy on top of ext4. Then installed Fedora 16, copied over the passwd/shadow/group data, added the ext4 /home to the fstab and rebooted. It seemed to work - but OMG, booting up takes a long time now.

The colours in KDE made some of the text unreadable - fixed that. Load was high - so I found and disabled nepomunk (desktop search engine - no I don't need that). Firefox and OpenOffice running OK. Then I started kmail. Oh dear. The load on my machine went through the roof. WTF is mysqld doing running? I didn't know that kmail now insists on using Anakondi for something - I'm not sure what - certainly I'm pretty sure I don't need it. More googling....apparently since v4.4 of kmail you can disable Anakondi. OK, how do I do that? Use the advanced tab in System Settings. What advanced tab? There is none!

It seems I'm not the only one to be very disappointed in KDE's bloatware.

If I wanted my PC to run very, very slow I would have installed Microsoft Windows on it. I've now spent nearly as much time trying to turn this into a useful computer as I did with MSWindows Vista on my daughter's laptop.

Oh, and kmail failed to important my configuration for SMTP (but didn't think to tell me) and decided to use the local sendmail instead (which I cannot be bothered configuring to handle authentication and TLS nevermind the complications of SPF).

So now wondering if I should switch to different window manager / desktop, or even a different distribution.

Going to a different distribution offers some advantages and will be just as painful as changing window manager. The big issue is migrating my kmail email database and having something which is likely to continue supporting flash for some time. The latter probably means something I can run Google Chrome in. Which narrows down the choices a LOT. I've never been a fan of the way Ubuntu manages permissions - the root user is there for a REASON. Gentoo is fast - and it will run Flightgear and Google Chrome...but it seems like very hard work. Mandriva seems to still be a popular choice - and there are lots of binary rpms for flightgear. However I think Centos looks like a safe option.