Kubuntu is an Ubuntu-derived distribution with the K Desktop Environment (KDE). The Kubuntu CDs are made up of Ubuntu's base plus KDE. You can get exactly the same effect by installing Ubuntu and adding the KDE packages from the Ubuntu archives.

Kubuntu is the result of several months effort to get KDE 3.4 into Ubuntu's main repository and create the first major derived Ubuntu distribution. Kubuntu is not a fork of Ubuntu but an official project of it, sharing the same package archive and infrastructure. It is possible to convert an Ubuntu system to Kubuntu or vice versa.

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What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Installer updates:

· Create sambashare group and add the initial user to it (#238224)
· Permissions on some system files and directories were set wrong when installing from Desktop CDs. For users tracking the recommended hardy-updates repository, this issue has already been corrected post-install (#288479)
· Record the partition table as changed when a single partition's file system type has changed, fixing bootloader installation failures when installing onto existing partitions (#149832)
· Fix writing of /var/log/installer/oem-id in OEM mode (#251751)
· Use the correct mirror for -security in the event of apt-setup/security_host being preseeded (#306356)

Desktop updates:

· KDE was updated to the current KDE3 release, KDE 3.5.10
· Fix codec installation loop on unsupported media in kaffeine (#210303)
· Fix khelpcenter's indexer to work with dash (#241916)
· Fix latexconvert in Kopete to work with dash (#183989)
· Fix latexconvert dash incompatibility (#267991)
· Fix problems with remote resources crashing kontact, most notably when using GCal (#286905)

General updates:

· Set hdparm power management to 254 for all hard drives while on AC, and 128 while on battery (note that suspend/resume still breaks this, and a more complete fix will be forthcoming for Ubuntu 8.04.3) (#59695)
· Support CDs with no uncompressed Packages files, only compressed ones, enabling upgrade to future releases using CDs (#255545)
· Conflict with old mysql 4.1 packages to ensure smooth upgrades from Ubuntu 6.06 (#208695)
· Backport cifs.upcall, to support Kerberos-authenticated CIFS kernel mounts (#236830)
· e1000 checksum recheck after reset (#60388)