The replacement RAM for my new workstation “curiousity” finally arrived yesterday, stuffed through the letterbox by the friendly neighbourhood courier to fall upon worn rental-property pile like the softest rain on virgin soils. I don’t normally get things delivered to my home address, since I’m always at work and the security entrance usually keeps the best delivery-people stranded beyond the glass; this time I was lucky that our neighbours are gutting their flat, so all the doors were propped open for the tradesmen.
Needless to say, I rushed home as soon as I could to install it, run some memory tests from the Ubuntu CD and then get stuck into installing Vista. Yes, Vista — I’ve had to install Windows for Danielle, traitorous though it feels to my penguiny heart. (Ironically, her first response to the new interface was, “Wow, that looks just like Linux!” My slow-but-steady subversion of her computing tastes is proceeding perfectly to plan!)
Once Vista was on I tried out some of the old-but-good-but-cheap games I’ve been buying of late: Deus Ex, Hitman, Neverwinter Nights, Black & White … all of them work, and they’re fun too! Once I got that out of my system it was onto the open source, cross-platform stuff (also for Dee’s mental subversion — get used to the applications and it doesn’t matter what platform you’re using): Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, AMSN, Picasa (still to do: Gimp. What else is there? Must investigate.).
Tonight I’m doing the second part of the puzzle: installing Ubuntu Feisty (beta) and dual booting! This is significantly more fun for me: Compiz/Beryl, a SMP kernel, Avahi service detection, Nvidia driver … Unfortunately the first thing I need to do is get my zd1211rw-based USB wireless adapter working (found something useful on the Ubuntu forums, so should be okay).
It’s been a very long day. Probably should go to bed before 2am tonight. Probably won’t.