Tried upgrading directly from 8.04. Bah ha hah ha. Left me with a dead system. Good thing I backed up 8.04 beforehand.
New approach: Install Ubuntu 9.10 freshly, thus bypassing kde4 entirely, then add Pearson repos.
Initial 9.10 without kde fine so far. After installing kde3 all of a sudden terminal input became sluggish. after a keypress it took up to 5 seconds before something happened. Not rebooted yet. Copied old .kde from other partition to .kde3.
After reboot: keyboard problem stays, DVB-T via Terratec Cinergy T2 not working. Google. Problem with that Cinergy. Plucked it, keyboard returns to normal. So this is NOT a kde3 problem, seems this just rolled in with another upgrade. Yeah well, now that Shuttleworth said he's had it *buntu will be going downhill I guess...
Back on topic.
KDE won't even start. /home/dexter now belongs to root:root for reasons beyond me - *that* now seems to be a kde3 thing indeed.
Fixed permissions manually.
Kopete lost theme settings. Minor casualty.
KMail works, no german i18n tho, GPG tested partially, seems to work (hope this still stands when I press the send key....), filters work.
Manually added KNewsTicker (one of the main reasons apart from that bloody Phonon thingy why I don't want to switch to KDE4)
Konqueror: no Baghira! I can bear with the theme, actually don't use it anymore, but the Baghira sidebar in Konq is one of the more useful additions. I want that back! Help!
Gonna reboot now and see if that recompiled v4l drivers do any good to the Cinergy problem.