Anybody who turns over a dozen patents royalty-free when used in conjunction with GPL software is a Master. Nice one, Raph.

Poor Brian took a tough hit in school. Hang in there: I completely flunked out once, gritted my teeth, and finally finished in 9 years. That's like 63 dog years or something. It was 7 years before the light at the end of the tunnel actually looked larger. I'm coining that the '7/9 ratio', as a lot of things seem like a plod until right at the end.

And yeah, I reinstalled the kde-corel-blah.deb and my box is back up like it used to be. I had to force the install. Now apt complains that the kde-corel package can't see my libapt-pkg2.5 version, because I upgraded apt (libapt-pkg2.7). I think maybe the kde-corel package is not being smart. Anyway, I can't use apt to do anything until I resolve this. I wish apt had a switch for 'forget this one thing and move on.' It doesn't help that Corel did their KDE as a single 20-some meg .deb. You think they could maybe break that one up into some littler pieces.

Another caveat for Corel users: You need to stick with the gpm_1.14-3 that comes with Corel for now. If you upgrade to gpm_1.17.8-16, the mouse doesn't work in X anymore.

Some good folks I respect think Corel isn't giving the Debian project a proper reach-around, but it's put together pretty well. Correction: It's got some very nice newbie features, and is slick on the front end. But doesn't hold up to being repointed at Debian too well. That distro may have a shot at some almighty market share. Not _the_ shot, mind you, just a shot. If they navigate the rought waters OK.

I got the long shot money on flek. You heard it here first today. : )