Gutsy is go!

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I now have a fully working install of Kubuntu Gutsy! I thought I'd give it one more go, and I managed to resolve the issue about the internet connection!
It turned out that my router was to blame. Apparently, D-Link routers don't work well with Linux - when you connect to it, it should forward you to your ISP's DNS, but instead it directs you to the router. Not quite sure I understand it, but I've resolved the issue by using Open DNS and changing a few text files.
I'm very relieved that I've got Gutsy working. Feisty was great, but there were reliability issues with it - it wouldn't display the splash screens for when it was loading up, and sometimes it would get stuck when closing down. Also, there's lots of goodies in Gutsy I wanted - Iceape, Thunderbird 2, Pidgin, etc. But most of all, I wanted a better wireless experience. There are two reasons Gutsy is better in this respect than Feisty:

1. Feisty had a driver for my wireless card, but it didn't support WPA, so I had to blacklist it and use ndiswrapper to run the Windows drivers, which was tiresome.
2. Gutsy has the 2.6.22 Linux kernel, which apparently is the first to feature a brand new wireless stack, making it much more reliable.

So far, my hopes in this respect have been borne out. Gutsy has flawlessly logged onto the wireless network every time I've used it and not dropped out yet, whereas Feisty was a bit troublesome - you'd have to spend ages trying to connect, then the connection would be prone to dropping out.

Now, that does mean I have to spend ages putting back all my applications, but I think it's well worth it for a more reliable wireless connection and more up-to-date software, don't you?