For a long time I haven't been able to find a decent replacement or alternative to KTimeTracker. But I've now succeeded: TimeCult.

It is currently lacking an installer for Linux, but it can be made to work with Linux easily.

I also found that it uses a very easy-to-deciper XML format, and, with the help of vobject, the KTimeTracker ical files are only slightly harder to figure out, so I created a Python script that will do the conversion.

Use the script like this:

./ics_to_timecult.py ~/.kde/share/apps/ktimetracker/ktimetracker.ics > out.tmt

It's here for reference - dependencies are vobject and elementtree:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Quick and dirty script to convert ktimetracker.ics files
# into TimeCult files.

import os.path
import sys
import time
import uuid

import elementtree.ElementTree as ET
import vobject


# Structures to store the tree of data. Use native Python data types, and
# convert to what TimeCult expects when we 'render'

class Struct(object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__.update(kwargs)


class TimeCult(Struct):
    # <timecult>
    # Eventual attributes:
    #  name
    #  projectTree
    #  timeLog

    def toXML(self):
        root = ET.XML('<timecult appVersion="0.12" fileVersion="10" />')
        root.attrib['uuid'] = str(uuid.uuid1())
        root.attrib['name'] = self.name
        pt = ET.Element('projectTree')
        for n in self.projectTree:
            pt.append(n.toXML())
        root.append(pt)
        tl = ET.Element('timeLog')
        for tr in self.timeLog:
            tl.append(tr.toXML())
        root.append(tl)
        return root

class Node(Struct):
    # <project> and <task>
    # Eventually will have these attributes:
    #  vtodo
    #  summary
    #  uid
    #  created
    #  parent
    #  children
    #  type = "project|task"
    #  finished
    def __repr__(self):
        return "<Node: uid=%s summary=%r, parent=%r>" % (
            self.uid,
            self.summary,
            self.parent.summary if self.parent is not None else None)

    def toXML(self):
        e = ET.Element(self.type)
        e.attrib['id'] = self.id
        e.attrib['name'] = self.summary
        e.attrib['created'] = str(int(time.mktime(self.created.timetuple()) * 1000))
        if (self.type == "task"):
            assert len(self.children) == 0
            e.attrib['status'] = 'finished' if self.finished else 'inProgress'
        else:
            for c in self.children:
                e.append(c.toXML())
        return e

class TimeRec(Struct):
    # <timerec>
    # Eventual attributes:
    #  startTime  # datetime
    #  duration   # seconds
    #  task       # Node
    def toXML(self):
        e = ET.Element("timeRec")
        e.attrib['taskId'] = self.taskId
        e.attrib['startTime'] = str(int(time.mktime(self.startTime.timetuple()) * 1000))
        e.attrib['duration'] = str(int(self.duration * 1000))
        e.attrib['notes'] = ""
        return e

def convert(filename):
    f = vobject.readOne(file(filename).read())

    # First parse Todos
    nodes = {}
    for vtodo in f.vtodo_list:
        n = Node(vtodo = vtodo,
                 uid=vtodo.uid.value,
                 summary=vtodo.summary.value,
                 created=vtodo.created.value,
                 finished=vtodo.contents['percent-complete'][0].value == "100"
                 )
        nodes[n.uid] = n

    children = {}
    for uid, node in nodes.items():
        vtodo = node.vtodo
        try:
            related_uid = vtodo.contents['related-to'][0].value
            node.parent = nodes[related_uid]
            children.setdefault(related_uid, []).append(node)
        except KeyError:
            node.parent = None

    for uid, node in nodes.items():
        node.children = children.get(uid, [])
        if len(node.children) == 0:
            node.type = "task"
        else:
            node.type = "project"



    autouid = 0 # For newly created Tasks

    # Now find the time information in the ICS file
    time_log = []
    for vevent in f.vevent_list:
        related_uid = vevent.contents['related-to'][0].value
        task = nodes[related_uid]
        if task.type == "project":
            # TimeCult can only cope with time events being against 'leaf' nodes
            # in the tree. So we need to adjust and create an additional leaf
            project = task
            undefined_l = [t for t in project.children if t.uid.startswith('autouid')]
            if len(undefined_l) > 0:
                task = undefined_l[0]
            else:
                task = Node(uid='autouid-%d' % autouid,
                            summary='other',
                            parent=project,
                            type="task",
                            created=project.created,
                            finished=False,
                            children=[])
                autouid += 1
                nodes[task.uid] = task
                project.children.insert(0, task)

        dtstart = vevent.dtstart.value
        dtend = vevent.dtend.value
        if dtstart.tzinfo is None:
            dtstart = dtstart.replace(tzinfo=dtend.tzinfo)
        if dtend.tzinfo is None:
            dtend = dtend.replace(tzinfo=dtstart.tzinfo)
        time_rec = TimeRec(startTime=dtstart,
                           duration=(dtend - dtstart).total_seconds(),
                           task=task)
        time_log.append(time_rec)

    # Now need to assign IDs
    taskId = 0
    for u, n in nodes.items():
        taskId += 1
        n.id = str(taskId)

    for tr in time_log:
        tr.taskId = tr.task.id

    return TimeCult(
        name=os.path.basename(filename),
        projectTree=[n for u, n in nodes.items() if n.parent is None],
        timeLog=time_log)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    filename = sys.argv[1]
    timecult = convert(filename)
    sys.stdout.write(
        """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>""" +
        ET.tostring(timecult.toXML()))

After being a loyal fan of KDE for a long time, I've just switched to GNOME.

I'm afraid to say that since the KDE 4 series, I've been unable to recommend KDE to anyone. With KDE 4.0 to 4.3, that was due to general crashiness, brokenness and bugs that are at the level of embarrassing — when a bug is obvious enough and significant enough that a new user would be shocked to find it and I would have a hard time explaining how I could use software that is clearly inferior to whatever they were using before (usually Windows).

With KDE 4.4, most desktop instability has been ironed out, but it has been replaced by problems that mean I can no longer stomach or risk staying with KDE for myself, let alone recommend it to anyone else. The final straw was that the framework for storing PIM data (Akondai) is turning out no better than I feared and is ‘losing’ some of my data.

I found that some things added to the address book ‘never’ actually end up in the file they are supposed to be stored in. I've added an e-mail address for a contact, and it appears to have added fine in KAddressBook. The data persists even across reboots etc., so it isn't ‘lost’ in one sense. Usually, the data appears in my std.vcf after a few seconds. In this case, however, four days later it still hasn't appeared in std.vcf. That counts as close enough to ‘never’ in my book, so it is fair to say it is ‘lost’. This has happened intermittently since KDE 4.4.1.

One additional result of this is that KMail never sees that address — at the moment it seems that it looks only in std.vcf, not Akonadi (and this is probably the only reason I found the bug in the first place). That's a pain, but the more serious problem is that my data is just not where it is supposed to be. If I need to backup and restore, I imagine it would be possible for that to succeed, if the Akonadi data was backed-up and restored along with the underlying data. But if you get that bit wrong, I can only imagine a world of pain and subtle data corruption. It is completely unacceptable that my data is being stored in “my data files + completely opaque Akonadi database” rather than just “my data files”.

Another bug is that the Google contacts Akonadi plugin also loses data in a serious way, making it far worse than useless. The nature of this bug makes me think that either there is a significant bug in the Akonadi framework, or that the framework API made it is easy to get this wrong — both of which are worrying.

These bugs are on top my general concerns with the framework — it has always been painful to work with, and the fact that it is even visible is a major failing — the software layer it replaced was, after all, completely invisible, just as it should have been.

From what I can tell, migration of KMail to Akonadi is going ahead at full pace and will be mandatory soon. My contact data is modest (500 Kb), so I have been able to cope with moving it around and fixing some problems, including some data loss and mistakes caused, I think, by the above bugs, since backups are quick. But my e-mail data is 2.5 Gb, and detecting problems or errors is going to be massively harder. I'm not willing to risk my e-mail data with Akonadi, so I need a new e-mail client.

It turns out that Evolution works for me. It stores data in mbox files, which isn't my preferred (1 file per e-mail, like maildir or MH, is nicer for various purposes), but it is a standard format, and since my backup tool is 'diff' based it will still cope efficiently with it. It even integrates with Google contacts out of the box, and the calendar app integrates with Google calendar, while allowing me to work offline. This is what Akonadi is supposed to offer one day, and I wish them the best of luck with that. But for now I'm going to stick with a system that prioritises the safety of my data, and that I know works. Evolution has a few significant niggles, but I think I can live with them.

That leaves me with the choice of desktop. Using programs from one desktop suite generally is faster and easier and looks nicer. I had already dropped Konqueror for Chrome (Konqueror has fallen far too far behind these days), and GNOME equivalents to most KDE apps work well enough — like Empathy/Pidgin. That tips the balance over to GNOME — and I can still use apps like k3b for specialist work when I need them.

Most of my reasons for leaving GNOME in the first place (about 7 years ago I think) have been resolved. GNOME apps like Nautilus and Evolution are no longer as excuciatingly slow and bloated as they used to be (and I don't think it is just that my computer got faster), and actually feel quite snappy most of the time. In some cases they definitely outperform the equivalent KDE default app (e.g. Eye of GNOME is very fast and works very nicely, doing 90% of what I used Gwenview for before, but much faster). Generally GNOME is much snappier as a desktop — it takes only about 5 seconds to start after I've logged in, which is much faster than KDE.

So I'm using Ubuntu's GNOME desktop, and I no longer have plasma and all the plasmoids. To be honest, I don't think I'm missing them. I have all the panel applets I need, and they are well designed and work properly. Proliferation of plasmoids is like the proliferation of apps on Apple app store — most of them are not worth having, and having to search through to find the ones that are is an anti-feature (not to mention that the new horizontal applet picker in KDE 4.4, which replaced the vertical one in KDE 4.3, is just awful — I don't understand how such a major regression happened).

I certainly won't shed a tear over Nepomuk/Strigi. After weeks of it constant disk activity as they attempted to index my files, they never seemed to do anything useful. They have been replaced by Tracker, which works very well, and very quickly, and without being a huge resource hog. It does not update immediately when I add new files, but it is fast enough to know that when I really want to find something in a real situation, it is likely to be in the index already. And it isn't the massive resource hog that Nepomuk was.

First experience with Ubuntu's GNOME has thrown up some problems. Here are some niggles I've been able to fix/solve:

• PulseAudio - this breaks lots of things, especially games, and provides no added benefit. But it can be removed. Perhaps the Ubuntu guys will remove it in future, or make it easier to remove. Lots of people and programs seem to have problems with it, it's very difficult to see what value it is adding for most people.
• To turn off desktop effects quickly (for better performance games) - either: install fusion-icon (use "fusion-icon -n" as the command) - or, to do it automatically for fullscreen games, set this option to true: /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/unredirect_fullscreen_windows
• To turn off screen locking on resume - there is setting is in gconf, search for 'lock'.

And here are some that are still bothering me a bit:

• Reading new e-mails with keyboard only - it's a bit buggy/confusing with Evolution.
• Some options are hidden away in gconf, so it's difficult to know if it is possible to change things.
• GNOME has less configurability in general, or harder to get to it, especially for creating new keyboard shortcuts.
• Compiz doesn't always seem to obey or understand all metacity options (e.g. shortcut for fullscreen-ing windows), so it sometimes confusing working out what is going on.
• The GNOME file dialog boxes have improved a little bit since I was last using GNOME, but haven't begun to close the gap on KDE's far superior ones.

But there are some niggles which are no longer there due to the switch from KDE. Overall, things are similar at this level.

To conclude, I think the KDE developers were far too ambitious with the KDE 4 series. The cost has been that the only supported versions of KDE are ones that you cannot recommend to anyone, and that is a critical mistake in a competitive environment. Meanwhile, GNOME has massively improved in speed and has incrementally added features that people actually need, instead of creating large frameworks that may or may not be robust and useful one day.

So, I'd like to be able to access my sync the calendar on my computer with other devices, like my BlackBerry Curve. This is 2010 right?

• I already blogged the failure to sync directly. Let's not go there.
• How about just syncing KOrganizer with Google, and syncing the BlackBerry with Google? I already have some calendars on Google, and that works fine. But now for my main calender:
  • I tried GCalDaemon, but found that it ignores/deletes all recurring events on your calendar. Which is pretty evil.
  • There is Akonadi... Given how hopelessly buggy Akonadi is for syncing contacts to Google (like, if Google has more than one e-mail for a contact, none of them are transferred, and worse), I'm not very hopeful about this (and I'm using most recent KDE 4.4.1). But I'll try anyway...
    • The whole experience is fraught with bugs and confusion. You click 'Add' and things aren't added, you click 'Remove' and they don't disappear, or only after some indefinite period of time (I've waited 30 seconds, is it just broken or should I carry on waiting?). You close the Akonadi configuration and open it again, or restart the server, and items have appeared, and other things that you didn't ask for. A lot seems to go on asynchronously, which might be a good idea, but you get the impression you are attempting to communicate with a forgetful, deaf, sleepy, indecisive, incompetent idiot. I have eventually managed to add a Google calendar resource, but it says "Failed getting last updated event", and nothing appears on my calendar.
• OK, let's try Evolution calendar. At first it didn't work, then it seemed to work a bit better, but trying to modify events returns "Unknown error", and now it refuses to show the calendar at all.
• OK, let's just try using Google calendar, importing all my existing calendar data, ditching any hope of using a local calendar app. But Google doesn't like my calendar file - "Failed to import events: Processing error during upload."

Epic fail. Bad day.

Update: in the last case, I discovered after some investigation that Google doesn't like the 'VTIMEZONE' sections in my calendar file. Removing them allows the import to succeed (although it still produces an error message, and I'm guessing it might have lost some time information on summer events though, not sure).

In terms of interface, it's not that bad, and I'm much happier than most people with the changes from Amarok 1.4, and I've been giving it a fair try.

I was annoyed that it provides a UI for putting albums into 'Various Artists', or removing then, but then forgets everything you've done next time you open the program when it rescans the collection. But I could live with that for the time being.

The fact that it clips the beginning off some tracks for some unknown reason is also really annoying (it clips 1.2 seconds off the beginning of one of my favourite tracks; Dragon Player, another KDE4 apps, also does it, but no other media players do so).

But it has started doing things that mean I just don't trust it with my MP3s any more:

Certain tracks start appearing with seemingly random album and artist names in the playlist (picked from other tracks in my collect), though they have the correct song title and play the correct song. If I right click and select 'Edit track details', the same wrong details appear (so if I were to press save, the wrong details would be saved back to the file). If, in the collection pane, I go to the album the track ought to be in, it is missing. I don't know how to find it again, except in the file browser. However, if I look at the same file in any other player or ID3 tag editor, the correct info appears. Somehow Amarok is not reading the info from the file itself, but from some other source which is corrupt.

This means that editing any track details in Amarok is now dodgy, since if I go to edit one detail, I can't be sure that other details will be supplied correctly, and when I save I could save Amarok's corrupt data to the file.

Perhaps purging the collection completely might help, but I'm not sure how to do it, and I don't really want to lose all the album covers etc.

I guess I should file a bug, but I've filed so many recently, and this is one I don't know how to reproduce, and it's fairly pointless filing it — as a developer myself, I know that, with the best will in the world, this kind of bug will eventually just get WORKSFORME.

Before, I couldn't trust Amarok to actually play tracks correctly, and now can't trust Amarok to show my collection so that I can find songs and albums, and I certainly can't trust it to manage the MP3 files.

Fairly damning I'm afraid. I'm posting this as a warning to others, Amarok could be corrupting the metadata in your MP3s...

Should I try upgrading to Amarok 2.1? Or do I just give up now and go back to mocp?

Search tool §

Obviously, first of all there is a need for a decent desktop search tool. On Linux, your main options are:

• Google desktop search
  • Main problem: it stops it's initial index after 100,000 documents. I've got far more than that, and it means it never actually reaches my mail. Typical crippleware. This is useless for me.
• Beagle
  • Main problem: it will decide to thrash your disk and/or CPU and crash. For me, runaway CPU usage and crashing made this completely useless. It might be 99% of the way to being brilliant, but until these things are sorted out, it is a 100% waste of time.
• Strigi
  • Minor problem: the GUIs suck
  • Minor problem: it indexes too much, sometimes.
  • Main problem: after indexing about 300,000 documents, Strigi dies on me and refuses to do anything useful at all. I don't know what causes it to choke, but it, too, is 100% useless AFAIC. Maybe it's fixed now, but I've got bored of filing bugs and compiling from source just to find out it still doesn't work.
• MetaTracker, or Tracker for short.
  • It can't search zip files etc. like Strigi can, which is a shame.
  • It doesn't yet index my emails (KMail) -- it only does evolution.
  • But I actually find this tool useful, . It doesn't thrash my disk, it has a simple but effective GUI, as well as command line tools, it integrates reasonably well into KDE, and it also has a nice tagging facility.

Tagging and Konqueror §

Adding tags to files needs to be easy to do if it's going to happen. MetaTracker provides the tracker-tag program which works well, but it is command line. So I've written a small GUI wrapper that integrates into Konqueror via a service menu. If you tag more than one file at once (by selecting a few files in Konqueror), it is in bulk tag mode, where it pops up an input box and simple adds the space-separated tags you enter to all the files.

In single file mode, it does something slightly different. It will first query the file for any existing tags, adding them to the default text that is in the input box, so that you can remove tags as well as add new ones. It will also add a suggestion for an 'ID' tag -- based on the filename, with punctuation replaced by hyphens, and with 'ID-' prepended. The idea is that I edit this and make it into something that will uniquely identify that file. For example, a file "bible reading schedule.pdf" ends up with the tag ID-bible-reading-schedule-pdf, but "rest-quickref2.html" I will expand to "ID-restructured-text-quickref-html", and in some cases I would have to include something else that will distinguish it.

The nice thing about these tags is that MetaTracker will keep track of them even if I move or rename the file. I'm not entirely sure how it does this (I think it uses inotify). But it works, and that's all I care about for now.

Migrating §

It may be that strigi / Nepomuk will mature and become useful. When they do, I can dump the tag database from MetaTracker pretty easily, and should be able to import into strigi. Changing the tools/scripts I've developed to use a different metadata database should be pretty simple.

Personal wiki §

On top of this, there are other things that file systems are just not very helpful for organising. Hierarchy works pretty well for about half my stuff (development work in particular). But notes and things I like to jot down often get lost on my disk -- there are multiple places that some things belong, and some belong nowhere at all.

I decided that a personal wiki would be the best way forward for this. However, I then had to choose a wiki -- thankfully the WikiMatrix helps a lot. I had tried the Instiki wiki. But it turns out that Ruby on Rails does suck as much as they say -- the instiki process would sit there at about 50Mb for a while, but then decide that it would use up all my memory. (Other people have noticed the same behaviour). So I wasted some time with that, and I don't think I'll be trying Ruby on Rails soon if this is the kind of thing I can expect.

But anyway, WikiMatrix helped me find the Trac wiki. Though I've used Trac a lot before, I hadn't thought of this option, as it is a wiki that is geared towards software projects, not general things. However, I've discovered it is ideal for me:

• You can very easily turn off all the stuff you don't want, and then those components just disappear from the interface, exactly like they should.
• It has all the help you need built in.
• Nice GUI for administering it -- you need to use the command line UI for the first few steps, and you need to use htdigest to set up a password file, which some people might find tricky, but as a developer I'm right at home with that kind of thing.
• It is written in Python, and it seems to be very well written too.
• It uses SQlite (can use other databases), so it easy to query from outside if necessary.
• It comes with a built in server -- very little setup, easy to run as a normal user.
• It has a plugin architecture with lots of good plugins, and you can easily write your own.

This has allowed me to bring lots of bits and pieces into one place, and organise them as loosely or tightly as I want. The TagsPlugin for Trac makes this particularly convenient. The wiki is actually pretty nice for composing blog posts too -- it can do all the code highlighting I want, and I can just copy the output HTML into my blog when it's ready.

Combining wiki and desktop §

The final problem is integrating wiki and other files. Obviously, I have many documents that are much better managed outside a wiki. It would be nice to be able to refer to these easily. And by writing some Trac plugins, this is actually pretty easy. I can now write things like this:

  file:ID-bible-reading-schedule-pdf

in my wiki and it turns into a file:/// link to the right document. In Konqueror, this works really well -- right clicking on the link brings up the same context menu that I would get in file browsing mode, so everything is available to me right there from the wiki page. I can also do a search:

  [[MetaTrackerSearch(programming languages,web)]]

This will returns links to all files containing the text "programming languages" and "web", nicely formatted in a table. Or I can do a tag search like this:

  [[MetaTrackerTagSearch(sermon)]]

to return all my sermons.

Further §

I've created a very simple Trac plugin for creating KioSword links, which works nicely for embedding links to Bible passages. I've got some ideas for further integrating different parts of my desktop. One thing I'd like to do is produce a database of my sermons and bible studies, the texts they are on, when and where I've preached them etc. A private Django app using the Django admin would probably work exceedingly well, and be very little work. A simple export routine could produce a wiki page that could be 'included' into my wiki (using a Trac macro). It could also export an read only ICal file which can be displayed in Kontact. So many cool ideas, so little time...

Download links §

• MetaTrackerPluginMacro

• tracker_tag_file
  Install this by putting it in your path somewhere (e.g. ~/bin, if that is on your PATH)
  It requires:
  • kdialog (present on all KDE installations)
  • setClipboard -- a little utility to set the clipboard with the contents of the tags just added, for convenience only, see below.
    

• setClipboard

• tagfile.desktop
  Install into ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/

• The upgrade tool failed -- in fact I've never ever had a 'dist-upgrade' go smoothly, despite the advertising. In my case after the tool failed, I had to manually do 'aptitude dist-upgrade' 3 times before everything was finally sorted out. Dist-upgrading is simply not for novices. I guess the problem is that people do it so infrequently, and test cases are so massively time consuming to set up, that it is never properly tested in the real world.
• The Ubuntu-packaged nVidia drivers disappear every time I reboot. It means I either have to use the open source 'nv' driver (and no accelerated graphics), or X fails to start and I have to manually reinstall a package.
• Even when I get the nVidia drivers it working, I still have X crashing on me when using Compiz. It only happens when I'm doing lots of things at once -- some changes in window activity at the same time as doing something in the background that is disk and CPU intensive (e.g. installing software). But this is still unacceptable for a default option.
• Compiz-fusion itself is quite nice (I've found a combination of plugins that works very nicely, giving me a nicely animated 2x4 desktop, plus 'Expo' and nice Alt-Tab mechanisms, with all my normal shortcuts for moving windows around). However, KDE integration is pretty bad -- whether I use the 'KDEWM' environment setting to start Compiz, or put something in ~/.kde/Autostart, I end up with lots of problems: the KDE window decorator dies at startup, and randomly dies at other times too; some windows that appear at startup, especially the prompt for the KDE Wallet, don't actually ever appear; using KDEWM, the 'Alt-F1', 'Alt-F2' KDE shortcuts don't work. The only safe method I've found is to do a manual 'compiz --replace' after my session is completely restored.
• KControl and KInfoCenter were empty -- thankfully the fix isn't too hard
• My Input Actions (KHotkeys) were wiped out (thankfully the relevant config file was not emptied, and eventually by trial and error I found a workaround)
• BibleTime crashes when you change an option for module display, which is a real killer for me. It also crashes/fails when you try to add/change side-by-side Bible translations to a window, which is equally painful.

What's left of the advertised benefits of Kubuntu Gutsy? Well, there is Dolphin -- but I already had that before. There is 'Restricted Drivers Manager' -- great, except that it completely failed with the nVidia drivers as described above. There is a newer version of strigi, but is no better than it has been in the past -- it is alpha quality software really (things like the daemon refusing to stop etc, dying randomly, and the interface being extremely basic compared to Beagle. Actually, it currently dies whenever I tell it start indexing, so it is basically useless. And this problem reoccurs after purging the indexes and starting again, after indexing about 300,000 documents).

Then there is GDebi, which is quite nice, but I'm not likely to use it often. Amarok 1.4.7 is included in Gutsy but I was using that anyway from the backports repository (using apt pinning to ensure I only got the packages I deliberated upgraded). There is also the enterprise version of KDE PIM, which I imagine is quite good for some people, but the only thing it brought me was a bug in which events are not updated in the calendar. Finally, the OpenOffice suite has been updated to version 2.3, which may well have some genuine improvements - I haven't used it enough to tell.

There was one really good thing -- 'Suspend' actually works on this non-laptop computer, for the first time. At least, it worked when using the normal 'nv' video driver---it didn't with the nVidia driver. I'm not hopeful that it will even if I get nVidia drivers properly sorted out. Which means that I'll either be choosing between the ability to have 3D accelerated graphics, and being able to suspend.

In conclusion --- there is nothing so far in Kubuntu Gutsy that I would have upgraded for. If the bugs above aren't fixed soon, then I would definitely be far better off with Feisty, but I'm still hopeful that the guys at Ubuntu may be able to get some of these sorted out.

UPDATE: Ubuntu 7.10 is upon us, and none of the above are addressed. I'm wondering how difficult it is to downgrade...

UPDATE 2: Although nothing has really been addressed, I've discovered how to get 'Hibernate' and 'Suspend' working with nVidia drivers. Since I'm no longer rebooting, aand not even having to log in again, this has alleviated some of the problems.

UPDATE 3: Thanks to help on a bug report, I got my nVidia modules to stop disappearing, result! Some genius also got BibleTime fixed up (had to compile from source, but it was worth it). X crashing got worse -- twice in 10 minutes yesterday -- so I've abandoned it again until the bug is fixed. But my system is basically all working now, and both Hibernate and Suspend now work perfectly, which is a real time/power saver, so I'm happy again :-)