TheSeatOfMyPants's Journal: And just as the industry goes gaga for flat UIs...

After my fstabbing post a few days ago, I eventually solved the problem in the somewhat illogical manner of attempting a reinstall of M12 on top of M11's (much larger) old partition. For a short while, most of my drives started failing to auto-mount at bootup, but thankfully, this time around it turned out to be because my old fstab configuration references had led me to make a serious error: they advocated the use of umask to set base file permissions without mentioning that it's not an ext* option. Past versions of Linux had never really responded to it (that I noticed), but this one reacts by refusing to automount the drives.

After getting Mepis 12 Beta all installed, marveling over how much faster it boots up and runs on my old Thinkpad T43, I discovered something useful in "upgrading" my account to the new version of KDE... When a substantially new version of KDE opens an existing account for the first time, it resets most preferences to the default, as if the old prefs were incompatible...but if you log out and restore them from a backup, almost everything works & looks just as it did before.

After getting that straightened out I went into the desktop effects to see if there was anything new, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover that I can finally blur translucent backgrounds! Yeah, everyone else with newer computers has had ample time to become bored and eventually repelled with things like blurred translucency, but I've wanted this ever since I first saw how neat it made titlebars look -- especially since most window decorations & desktop themes for KDE4 are dull without translucency and near-unusable if translucent but not blurred. I find it funny that this happens just as everyone else moves on to thinking flat decor is awesome (and if I start seeing colorful decorations/themes/icons rather than monochrome up the arse, I'll agree), but I always have marched to the beat of a non-percussive instrument...