[OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.

[Peter Alcibiades]

All this is a reason for going with Debian proper rather than Ubuntu.  You
get continuous upgrades.  Whereas Ubuntu, you have Debian in the background,
but you have to do clean re-installs every time you do a major upgrade.  So
with Ubuntu, you have all the disadvantages of Debian and none of the
advantages. 

If going with a release type upgrade, there is a lot to be said for Mandriva
or PCLinux.  2008.1 was a pretty good release of Mandriva, and you can
choose from KDE 3 or Gnome in the One versions.  2009 is KDE 4.1, so its
probably worth waiting a while for a KDE 4.2 release, as lots of stuff is
still incompatible and there is still a bit of work to be done on usability.
Mandriva updates, you can just clean install without formatting /home, and
its pretty reliable.

If going with a Debian derivative there is a lot to be said for Mepis, which
does do continuous upgrades. I would go with Debian Etch by the way, if
going to Debian - there is no percentage in even going with Lenny until it
becomes Stable.

On older machines, there's a lot to be said for Zenwalk.  Xfce & Slackware
based.  Or Debian with Fluxbox.

The blackout might be a misconfigured xorg issue.  I've met this with
installing Lenny.  Problem is that dpkg-reconfigure does not seem to give
you proper access to the xorg parameters in their currently packaged version
of xorg, so this means editing xorg.conf by hand, which is no fun - and I
could not make even this work last time.

On /home and partitions, yes, /home should always be a separate partition. 
If you have configuration problems, dpkg-reconfigure.  I can't see any
reason to have /usr/bin on a separate partition.  It used to be recommended
to put /usr on a separate partition, but I always thought it more trouble
than its worth.  Still less reason to put Grub on one.  What does this get
you?
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