I’m not sure what made today different than any other day. Maybe it started yesterday, in the evening, as I fiddled with the bike. I didn’t do much – just some handlebar adjustments and bleed the rear brake. But it felt good to have a wrench in my hand, something I do less of in the winter. I guess the feeling spilled over into today.

So I burned a Ubuntu 7.10 desktop install CD, hauled one of the old laptops – an HP ze5170 – up from the basement and booted XP on it one last time – just to make sure it still worked. It was destined to get a new lease on life!

I began by yanking the rug out from under Windows and booting from the newly burned CD. It liked the display and keyboard as well as the native pointing device, a Synaptics touchpad. I started the installer and went to hunt up an Ethernet cable. I cabled it to the network. I read the Release Notes. No showstoppers there so I pressed on. I was surprised to find the default location selected was acceptable – New York. Had it figured that out from my network or was it coincidence?

Using my personal laptop I logged onto my DHCP server and found that the target box had acquired an IP address and called itself ‘ubuntu’. I saw that a bit of network configuration would be necessary later on. Machines here get named for life, so this one would need its old name and IP. Eventually I would – I hope – configure the old PCMCIA wireless card, but for now the cable would suffice. I turned to the install.

I decided take the guided entire disk option and banish Windows once and for all. I set my name, my login name and password, and chose the machine name. Ooh, what’s this Advanced button on the confirmation screen? Oh, just the boot loader stuff and a survey checkbox. Maybe later. Let’s get the show on the road!

This is a good time to talk a little about what I’d like to ultimately accomplish. I want some kind of Linux running native on the hardware. And some kind of virtual environment – probably VMware – with XP installed, for those times when I need to use Windows. After all, I’ve got quite an investment in good Windows-based software… And run the whole ball of wax with one of those encryption packages that encrypts the entire disk. If I accomplish all that, then I’ll invest in a new battery and use this as my travel laptop for visiting clients and stuff like that. My personal laptop is overkill for that job, the 10 lb desktop replacement that it is. But if this experiment goes well I may just cut over to something like this full-time…

Since presumably laptop would need to boot the new install it seemed like a good time to prepare the network. Ah, I see that there’s a new rev of router software to deal with at some point, too. I thought for a minute that I’d be surprised by a lack of need for a restart. But no, there it was. The elapsed time? Twenty minutes from jamming in the install CD. Not too shabby.

The install CD wouldn’t eject, perhaps because it’s running the OS from the CD now? Yup, that was it. The blank screen during the restart was a little unnerving and seemed to take a while. I checked the network from my personal laptop and watched the DHCP sever hand out its new address. Turning back to the still-blank screen, I poked at the keyboard and the screen came to life.

Holy guacamole! There were 196 updates to be made. I’d be damned if I’d bother to examine each one, just do ’em, dammit. And I went to the kitchen and put on another pot of coffee, the second of the day. The quarter gig of updates downloaded fairly quickly. The updater kicked into the install phase and warned, “[…] this can take some time.” And it did. Another twenty-five minutes in total. And then it wanted another restart, which was a little disappointing. Windows does that when you look crooked at it. I was hoping for more, er, less. Well, there were quite a few updates, and it had been a fresh install.

The blank screen while restarting was still unnerving. And again it took a while. I wondered which boots faster, this or Windows? This was three minutes, clock time, to a login prompt, and another three-quarters of a minute to the desktop.

Thus began a couple of fun hours of messing around with Ubuntu 7.10. I didn’t get very far trying to connect to the network printer. I didn’t get too far configuring the wireless card; driver issues, it looked like. It talked nice to a USB thumb drive collecting dust on my desk, but didn’t play the AVI file on it all the way through without losing audio and getting choppy. It still boots slowly, really, on par with XP on that box if I recall correctly, maybe a little slower. And hibernation, an obvious thing to attempt, made for some really interesting looking (but quite useless) stuff on the screen when it attempted to come back to life. The only sign of life besides that and the running the fan was the caps-lock indicator blinking.

I noted my login credentials for future reference, shut it down properly, stuffed it back into the carry-case, shuttled it back to the stack of stuff in the basement. For a rainy day, I figured. It had been a pleasant diversion, but there was real work yet to do.