OpenBSD 4.5 update: Reinstall goes quickly, X still in trouble; still running Ubuntu 8.04

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system.

That took all of 10 minutes.

I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact.

And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop. X looked great. I saw a brief "artifact" in the form of a couple words out of place in Firefox (yep, I did have to reinstall EVERY app). But all did seem OK.

Until I quit X.

It wouldn't start again. Segmentation faults? Yep. Curiously, my root user could restart X. Just not my user. The system kept creating .Xauthority files and leaving them in my /home directory. I think one of my old dot-files in my /home directory is wreaking some kind of havoc with X. If that's all that's going on, that is.

I shelved the OpenBSD laptop for the time being, but next move is to create a new user account with a new, clean /home directory. Then I'll see how X runs.

Right now I have the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop running. I added my go-to light image editor, MtPaint. I reconfigured the Mail icon to start Thunderbird instead of Evolution.

And I used the Wolvix live CD to run Gparted and greatly shrink my Windows XP partition and increase the size of my Linux root and /home partitions. Eventually I'll wipe XP from this drive. It's very much unpatched, and I really don't need it.

I also turned off Compiz. Aside from stealing CPU and memory that I expect I'll need, it makes me a bit nauseous to see the screen sliding by like that. Yep, Compiz gives me motion sickness. You read it here first.