Few rants...

First: I'm switching from emacs back to vim. It's nice to have everything integrated into emacs, it's calculator is especially good (reminds of HP48), but I've found emacs nearly impossible to use for C++ coding. Namely, its internal parser gets often confused, and it won't let you type a simple colon (':'). Usually closing the file and opening it again fixed the problem, but not few days ago. Emacs simply refused to allow me to type in ':' (as in 'public:'). That was too much for me, and I switched back to vim (I've anyway used vi emulation in emacs; i find concise vi-keystrokes much more accessible than emacs' endless strings of characters in combination with alt/meta..)

Second: ubuntu sucks! I have it installed on my desktop machine on work, because that's "what everyone else uses" and only ubuntu CD's are available for installation. Today I ran the latest upgrade of 8.04, rebooted the machine and I was greeted with half-functional GNOME. I.e. the gnome-panel was missing and had I not had some folders on desktop that allowed me to get access to the file manager and eventually run an xterm, it would be completely unusable (i.e. none of the keyboard short-cuts worked either). Solution? I have no idea -- I installed xfce4 to get a functional desktop. The good thing is that xfce4 does not display the annoying update notification every now and then :-D Anyway, ubuntu owes me compensation for 1.5 hours of lost work time. Talk about "no-cost" software :-P