Thank you Kubuntu.....

[sabashuali]

That's it! My Debian system has finally had enough abuse and decided to call it a day. It has basically rendered my computer, pretty much a paper weight. :O
I knew it was coming..... :x:
So the first thing I did was to get a live CD. As I could not bear using anything but KDE, I decided to go for Kubuntu. I had after all, 14GB of information which was not important, but I felt bad erasing in preparation for a new install.
It worked a charm. Mounting the effected HDD was easy-peasy. I am actually writing these lines from the Live-CD. So now I am just busy transferring files...
But in the process, I finally found a way of installing Debian with literally, only the packages I wanted (in my case Xfce4 and a few others) and I learned how to burn a CD image from the command line..... I know.....not much but a real achievement for me!
I now have a laptop which whizzes about effortlessly and soon, a newly build bespoke KDE system.
I promise to never, ever, ever mess up my Linbox again!
Yeah, rrrright! :doh:

 

[Addis]

Shame about the Debian system. I guess you can't really complain when you're running the unstable version. I completely reinstalled Debian testing, and it's been fine.

 

[sabashuali]

I guess you can't really complain when you're running the unstable version

Oh, I know that! But the breakage was entirely my fault. Things started going wrong for me when I started uninstalling various things.
I knew what I was heading for very quickly. I think the system coped really well considering what I was doing. Aaanyway, I have been running Sid on my laptop now for a number of weeks and everything is AOK!

Although I barely see Windows these days, a re-installation is a nice game I do not mind playing. All my important data sits on a shared drive so I am not too bothered killing an installation and then starting from scratch. It also gives me an opportunity to revisit some aspect of the installation which I missed or did not pay attention to before....

So smiles all 'round..... :)

 

[megamaced]

Usually when I reinstall the OS I keep my home directory and rename the .kde directory to kde_old so I keep all my previous settings. Then I transfer some of those settings to the new .kde directory which saves me having to reconfigure most of my programs.

 

[sabashuali]

Usually when I reinstall the OS I keep my home directory and rename the .kde directory to kde_old so I keep all my previous settings. Then I transfer some of those settings to the new .kde directory which saves me having to reconfigure most of my programs.

Yeah! Good idea.
But, I am such a basic user that I hardly have any special settings.
Come to think of it I do not have any at all.
I use programs as they are most of the time. My use is so basic that re-installing the OS for me is basically just like re-installing a program. In other words, quite painless.
But, as I did not know you could do that.... here is my lesson for the day!

Cheers!