Ubuntu Eee now looking fabulous.

Yesterday I had some reservations about Ubuntu Eee particularly due to problems I had with 3D effects and Yakuake.
Know what the culprit was? Yes, the so-called Netbook Remix which seems to have been designed to make Ubuntu Eee as ungeeky as possible and probably ties in with EeePC's originally targetted audience of schoolkids.
Luckily this is easy to get rid of although I did run into a small problem which is explained in this post.
Essentially, the solution was, as it often is, to reboot.
After this, Ubuntu Eee started to look amazing. In everything I've done today, I cannot see anywhere where Ubuntu Eee is lacking anything in comparision to the full blown Ubuntu Hardy on a full-sized box.
Simply, everything works great -- 3D effects, Yakuake, AWN, Livestation, Brazilian characters
I installed AWN from the Reacocard repo and. again, everything worked fine.
The only problem I had, if you can even call it a problem, relates to a slight, but easily resolvable, difficulty to get sound working when an audio app starts up. I posted to the forum on this but have yet to receive a reply.
I also had another sound problem in that the headphones gave a lot of static-type noise even with no audio app playing. However, to resolve this was just a matter of muting the Microphone in the sound mixer.
All-in-all, a very pleasing day.

Getting accented letters in Foresight Linux.

I had been trying for months to get accented letters (Portuguese language) with the Bra (Brazil) keyboard layout.
Now, I could always get accented letters like ô, ã and í in both Gedit and a terminal but NOT in webpages (like Gmail or forum messages) or in Yakuake (strange this is different from a terminal) where the same characters turn out like ^o, ~a and ´i.
But today I found the answer. You just install group-xorg-fonts-extra and that's it. I can now get all of my accented characters with exactly the same facility as I can on all other OSes.
Actually, Iṽe just discovered while I was writing this that the solution involved invoking SCIM. I only noticed this because a SCIM icon showed up in the panel on the Mac (although I had never actually started SCIM). When I quite SCIM, the accented characters in Bra went with it. They came back, however, once I invoked SCIM again with the command scim.
So it seems the group-xorg-fonts-extra is part of SCIM.
Not sure about this but at least I can get my Portuguese characters when I want them.

Problem with accents (Portuguese) in KDE4

The problem seems to be related to scim in Kurumin anyway.
To overcome the problem, you just have to completely remove scim with this command:

sudo dpkg -P im-switch skim scim-bridge-agent scim-bridge-client-qt scim-modules-socket scim-qtimm libscim8c2a libskim0

Accented characters

I had been happily typing in Portuguese in the Kurumin OS for some time without any problems (just click the icon to change to the BR keyboard layout).
However, yesterday, I upgraded to KDE 4.1 and found that in BR I could not type letters like ê and ã. Instead they came out like ^e and ~a.
I did a lot of searching in Keyboard>>Layout>>Layout Options but none gave the characters back.
I found posts that seemed to suggest that this was a KDE bug although no solution was provided.
However, I had noticed ever since the KDE4 upgrade a small colourless icon in the panel that I had never used. This turned out to be SCIM and it provided three options:

Inglês/Teclado
Outro - Inglês/europeu
Outro - CÓDIGO RAW

I chose Outro - Inglês/europeu and my accented characters were back.
Where this SCIM came from, I not sure. Is it a part of KDE4 or did I inadvertently activate it from somewhere?