I spent a good two hours last night trying to upgrade the firmware of my Samsung GT-i7500 (aka the Galaxy Android phone) from its current g-series firmware to the latest i-series -- a task made difficult by the complete absence of Microsoft-OS-running PCs in my house. Unless you count the old xbox, but even that is running XBMC as a default dashboard, so unless we borrow a laptop from work we are practically an MS-free zone.

Almost: we do have legal copies of both Vista and XP Home, but the only machines they are installed upon are virtual. The first thing I realised was that VirtualBox 2.1.4 didn't allow you to assign USB devices to the virtual machine, so it was time to upgrade to VirtualBox 3.0 -- but then that didn't work either.

Oh no, I thought, am I going to have to install Windows somewhere?

Luckily not: I brought my handset, USB cable and installation CD-ROM to work today and did the firmware update at lunchtime. Installing software on Windows reminds me again why I like GNU/Linux (and Ubuntu) so much -- three separate reboots required to: update the system; install the crappy Samsung New PC Studio from the CD-ROM; install the latest Samsung NPS from the Internet.

But after all that, I finally have the II5 firmware installed. It's already better! I've had the phone unplugged for half a day already, and it's not out of juice! The G-series firmware would've been!

Happy days.