If I am not in Nirvana, then I am close enough to smell it! 
Yesterday I bit the bullet and blew both Kubuntu installations off this Sony, and installed the 1-17-2010 version of the Daily LiveCD of Kubuntu Lucid Lynx, giving it the entire HD.
KDE 4.4 is gorgeous, fast, powerful and very functional! 8)
But, even Lucid has warts. Here is what I've found on this BETA release.
Stellarium
On my old 32 bit Jaunty partition Stellarium 0.10.1 and 0.10.2 ran fine. On my 32bit Karmic partition (upgraded from the Jaunty) Stellarium also ran fine. On my 64bit Karmic partition Stellarium 0.10.2 had garbled menus but star navigation worked fine. On the 64bit Lucid Lynx the Stellarium 0.10.3 menus have been repaired and work better than ever. One problem, though: the stars do NOT show!
The bottom menu shows my FOV and FPS values, which fluctuate according to what my mouse is doing, but no stars. On a lark, I decided to search for Jupiter. When I hit the search button the Sun appeared, with little circles to its right and left. The circles were labeled with the names of the planets but there were no planets inside the circles. A bracket surrounded where Jupiter should be. I hit the space bar and the empty circle surrounding the region in space where a bright dot representing Jupiter should have appeared was centered on the screen. I began zooming in and Jupiter, along with its four major moons appeared and I was able to fill the screen with a good image of Jupiter. When I zoomed back out to my normal view Jupiter disappeared. I found no config button that turned stars on or off. I did increase the magnitude level, which caused more labels for stars that had labled to appear, but no stars.
EDIT: 3/3/2010 -
Found the fix that brings the stars back to Stellarium 0.10.3. Open ~/.stellarium/config.ini and under the [main] section change "use_glshaders" from true to false.
Skype
In both 32b Jaunty and 64b Karmic my HDA Intel audio card was detected and configured properly. KMix included three capture sliders, a mic and mic boost, slider, and three dropdown combo boxes for Input sources, where I could select mic, cdrom or line as the input for each of the three input boxes.
In the 64b Lucid Lynx the detection of my HDA didn't go so well. There are NO input source configuration combo boxes, and only one capture slider, that being for the microphone. But, when I fired up the 64bit Skype my cousin could not hear me, although the video worked fine. I opened a console and ran "sudo alsamixer".
It showed a "Digital" slider which KMix did not show. I ran its setting up from zero to 87 and restarted Skype. I had sound in Skype again. This is interesting to me because a symptom of the problem is, when you are trying various settings of mic, boost and capture, is to get a voice which sounds like a diver under water who takes off his mask and starts talking. The voice is extremely garbled. I had a friend who recently purchased an ASUS K50 notebook on special at BestBuy for $449. When I installed 64b Karmic on it I encountered that problem with Skype but didn't have a solution at the time (about a week ago). Now, I know what to do to fix it. Note: my usual sound/voice Canary is Audacity. When I can make a nice recording of my voice with Audacity it usually meant that the codec and mic was set right for all apps which use the mic. Not any more.
EDIT: 3/3/2010
The fix for the garbled sound in Skype is to open Alsamixer and left arrow to the "digital" column. Raise it from zero to the top of the white range.
Yahoo, Google, Virtuoso and Nepomuk
The Yahoo vs Google thing is an easy solve. Just switch from yahoo to Google in the search bar option menu.
Virtuoso is a new vendor dependency. I prefer PostgreSQL but, unfortunately, Canonical has decided to bind strigi's file indexer and storage function to Virtuoso. Remove it and Nepomuk fails.
KVM-Qemu
I still need to have a viable Windows environment to support a single application which was built using a tool for which no counterpart in Linux exists; IQAN from Parker.com. On the 32bit Jaunty I installed the Pro version of Codeweaver's CrossOver Office, 7.0, and that worked well. I decided to try the new KVM-quemu on my 64b Lucid. The KVM version threw a fault when I tried to install WinXP. So, I tried qemu alone. It took over 4 hours for the WinXP CD I own to install. When it appeared XP was only 640X480 and neither itself nor qemu would allow me to resize the window and present a decent screen. I reluctantly decided to try VirtualBox-ose. Reluctant because I've used VMPlayer before and like it VirtualBox requires kernel modifications. Such modification have, in the past, increased the problems with upgrading the kernel.
The installation of a guest WinXP took less than an hour with Virtualbox, and I am now running a 1024x768 screen in WinXP. IQAN and everything else works nicely on WinXP. After I registered my installation I disabled the connection to the wireless so I wouldn't have to be concerned with unwanted intrusions or unnecessary updates. Email or browsing will never take place on that guest OS.
Wicd, Knetworkmanager, netapplet, knm-runtime, etc...
Lucid came with knm-runtime and some knetworkmanager guis and stuff installed. They immediately found my wireless and had no problem connecting. But, I wanted to switch to Wicd so that my wireless connected before kdm started up, so if the desktop crashed I still had access to the web without going through a cli connection hassle. The last time i switched to wicd, Synaptic automatically downloaded wicd, then removed knetworkmanager, and then installed wicd and reestablished a wireless connection. It appeared to do the same under Lucid but upon examination I found that wicd was using knm components! Removing ALL of the knm components resulted in wicd's config screen not being able to set up a WPA connection! I ended up having to remove every library related to knm and wicd itself. Reboot. Plug in an eth0 cable, run Synaptic and install wicd only. The gave me only wicd with WPA settings capability.
and
GoogleEarth works very nicely!
QtCreator 1.30 works very nicely!
In fact, except for my "exceptions" everything I've run has run well.
Yesterday I bit the bullet and blew both Kubuntu installations off this Sony, and installed the 1-17-2010 version of the Daily LiveCD of Kubuntu Lucid Lynx, giving it the entire HD.
KDE 4.4 is gorgeous, fast, powerful and very functional! 8)
But, even Lucid has warts. Here is what I've found on this BETA release.
Stellarium
On my old 32 bit Jaunty partition Stellarium 0.10.1 and 0.10.2 ran fine. On my 32bit Karmic partition (upgraded from the Jaunty) Stellarium also ran fine. On my 64bit Karmic partition Stellarium 0.10.2 had garbled menus but star navigation worked fine. On the 64bit Lucid Lynx the Stellarium 0.10.3 menus have been repaired and work better than ever. One problem, though: the stars do NOT show!
The bottom menu shows my FOV and FPS values, which fluctuate according to what my mouse is doing, but no stars. On a lark, I decided to search for Jupiter. When I hit the search button the Sun appeared, with little circles to its right and left. The circles were labeled with the names of the planets but there were no planets inside the circles. A bracket surrounded where Jupiter should be. I hit the space bar and the empty circle surrounding the region in space where a bright dot representing Jupiter should have appeared was centered on the screen. I began zooming in and Jupiter, along with its four major moons appeared and I was able to fill the screen with a good image of Jupiter. When I zoomed back out to my normal view Jupiter disappeared. I found no config button that turned stars on or off. I did increase the magnitude level, which caused more labels for stars that had labled to appear, but no stars.EDIT: 3/3/2010 -
Found the fix that brings the stars back to Stellarium 0.10.3. Open ~/.stellarium/config.ini and under the [main] section change "use_glshaders" from true to false.
Skype
In both 32b Jaunty and 64b Karmic my HDA Intel audio card was detected and configured properly. KMix included three capture sliders, a mic and mic boost, slider, and three dropdown combo boxes for Input sources, where I could select mic, cdrom or line as the input for each of the three input boxes.
In the 64b Lucid Lynx the detection of my HDA didn't go so well. There are NO input source configuration combo boxes, and only one capture slider, that being for the microphone. But, when I fired up the 64bit Skype my cousin could not hear me, although the video worked fine. I opened a console and ran "sudo alsamixer".
It showed a "Digital" slider which KMix did not show. I ran its setting up from zero to 87 and restarted Skype. I had sound in Skype again. This is interesting to me because a symptom of the problem is, when you are trying various settings of mic, boost and capture, is to get a voice which sounds like a diver under water who takes off his mask and starts talking. The voice is extremely garbled. I had a friend who recently purchased an ASUS K50 notebook on special at BestBuy for $449. When I installed 64b Karmic on it I encountered that problem with Skype but didn't have a solution at the time (about a week ago). Now, I know what to do to fix it. Note: my usual sound/voice Canary is Audacity. When I can make a nice recording of my voice with Audacity it usually meant that the codec and mic was set right for all apps which use the mic. Not any more.
EDIT: 3/3/2010
The fix for the garbled sound in Skype is to open Alsamixer and left arrow to the "digital" column. Raise it from zero to the top of the white range.
Yahoo, Google, Virtuoso and Nepomuk
The Yahoo vs Google thing is an easy solve. Just switch from yahoo to Google in the search bar option menu.
Virtuoso is a new vendor dependency. I prefer PostgreSQL but, unfortunately, Canonical has decided to bind strigi's file indexer and storage function to Virtuoso. Remove it and Nepomuk fails.
KVM-Qemu
I still need to have a viable Windows environment to support a single application which was built using a tool for which no counterpart in Linux exists; IQAN from Parker.com. On the 32bit Jaunty I installed the Pro version of Codeweaver's CrossOver Office, 7.0, and that worked well. I decided to try the new KVM-quemu on my 64b Lucid. The KVM version threw a fault when I tried to install WinXP. So, I tried qemu alone. It took over 4 hours for the WinXP CD I own to install. When it appeared XP was only 640X480 and neither itself nor qemu would allow me to resize the window and present a decent screen. I reluctantly decided to try VirtualBox-ose. Reluctant because I've used VMPlayer before and like it VirtualBox requires kernel modifications. Such modification have, in the past, increased the problems with upgrading the kernel.
The installation of a guest WinXP took less than an hour with Virtualbox, and I am now running a 1024x768 screen in WinXP. IQAN and everything else works nicely on WinXP. After I registered my installation I disabled the connection to the wireless so I wouldn't have to be concerned with unwanted intrusions or unnecessary updates. Email or browsing will never take place on that guest OS.
Wicd, Knetworkmanager, netapplet, knm-runtime, etc...
Lucid came with knm-runtime and some knetworkmanager guis and stuff installed. They immediately found my wireless and had no problem connecting. But, I wanted to switch to Wicd so that my wireless connected before kdm started up, so if the desktop crashed I still had access to the web without going through a cli connection hassle. The last time i switched to wicd, Synaptic automatically downloaded wicd, then removed knetworkmanager, and then installed wicd and reestablished a wireless connection. It appeared to do the same under Lucid but upon examination I found that wicd was using knm components! Removing ALL of the knm components resulted in wicd's config screen not being able to set up a WPA connection! I ended up having to remove every library related to knm and wicd itself. Reboot. Plug in an eth0 cable, run Synaptic and install wicd only. The gave me only wicd with WPA settings capability.
Completely removed the following packages:
modemmanager
network-manager
network-manager-openconnect
network-manager-openvpn
network-manager-pptp
network-manager-vpnc
knm-runtime
network-manager-kde
plasma-widget-networkmanagement
modemmanager
network-manager
network-manager-openconnect
network-manager-openvpn
network-manager-pptp
network-manager-vpnc
knm-runtime
network-manager-kde
plasma-widget-networkmanagement
Installed the following packages:
python-urwid (0.9.9.1-1)
python-wicd (1.7.0-2)
wicd (1.7.0-2)
wicd-cli (1.7.0-2)
wicd-curses (1.7.0-2)
wicd-daemon (1.7.0-2)
wicd-gtk (1.7.0-2)
python-urwid (0.9.9.1-1)
python-wicd (1.7.0-2)
wicd (1.7.0-2)
wicd-cli (1.7.0-2)
wicd-curses (1.7.0-2)
wicd-daemon (1.7.0-2)
wicd-gtk (1.7.0-2)
GoogleEarth works very nicely!
QtCreator 1.30 works very nicely!
In fact, except for my "exceptions" everything I've run has run well.