It's a 775 --  though I am determined to simply get a better CPU -- my luck with overclocking has never been all that hot. I also mean to get a couple of gigs of memory -- I presently have 768 -- even though IMHO the notion that it improves speed THAT much is greatly exaggerated. I should probably buy an SATA drive at some point, too (I still really miss my old 4 gig SCSI -- most Amiga-like thing about my old PC).

Was horrified to learn the truth about AGP -- I had a 4 meg Hercules card for-EVER that gave me pretty decent performance for it's time (got me through the Sims 1, at least) -- but I'm much happier with my new nVidia card, especially given that it's an elcheapo mid-range model. Still get the mild hiccup -- I went out and found a copy of PCI Config 3 (which now needs an installer, apparently) -- which pointed out that SiS (how did they survive long enough to make a functional chipset?!?) had set my IDE controller to 128, when everything else was 64.

I have to admire the state of reverse engineering these days -- learning to write drivers is one of those tasks that one day, when I'm bored and have a lot of free time, I want spend some time looking into. I'm told it's not as much rocket science as I tend to think.

I wondered if Ubuntu's release names weren't something similar to how Apple keeps naming their stuff after big cats or Microsoft names their stuff after large cities (Chicago? What's in Chicago besides bad toll roads?). Still. There are no penguins in Finland that I know of, and they show up all over stuff. There was some discussion about whether or not Drupal should use code names for releases, which I seem to recall was voted down as silly and unnecessary. I guess a versioning system was at least decided on, which works for me.

It depends. Windows and Office need 512, as bare minimum, but I do a lot of graphic work, and some time I have PhotoshopCS2 and Freehand11 and Corel12 and iTunes and a lot of open folders at once. I find 1Gig cramped. Maybe 2 Gigs is the sweet spot. Windows doesn't use that much Ram to speed the system. On the other hand, Apple and it's OSX made a terrific job of cache and virtual memory management, so it uses every bit of extra Ram it can find to improve caching. One thing that used to improve a lot my system's performance was RAID. Stripping two disks in parallel made wonders when working with photoshop. But nowdays RAID is not so impressive, since disks became so much faster. And incidently, wait for the new drives with nand memory cache. For the time being only Vista will take advantage of those, but will improve a lot the spin up access speed. And for portables are an absolute must, since they permit long periods of spin down time.

Yeah, that's pretty much the size of it -- RAM doesn't speed the system so much as it prevents it from bogging down when it starts to bloat. I'm not worried about Vista any too much -- I'm not convinced I'll necessarily be drug kicking and screaming into using it the way I was with XP.

I'll probably screw around with RAID once I get an SATA drive, though. Should at least be a decent place to put my swapfile (another idea the industry can get over, IMHO).

Vista is  (as I'm told, since I've never fooled around with it) just a revamped XP with lots of eye-candy, and not the earth-shattering experience it was touted to become, some years ago. But anyway, as some details surface, I find some them very nice. This one, particularly, of using several forms of non-volatile memory devices to help performance and usability is very interesting. I just wonder how long it will be replicated in the open-source world...

While it's not like I think anybody should give me a medal or anything, I wanted to point out that I finally got Ubuntu to install today. I guess the third time was the charm, however cheesy I feel saying so. Because my most recent attempt was so utterly textbook, it seems worth pointing out for anyone contemplating looking into it that I just happened to have hit a few weird snags relating to partitions in my own attempts.

For the time being, I simply wanted to throw together a scratch partition (ultimately, it's less hassle giving a dual-boot O/S it's own partition than it is to try to install them both to the same one, regardless of which O/S' are being installed) and after some hunting around for a Windows x64 compatible partition manager (x64 compatible software is something of a rarity under the best of circumstances), I had a 20 gig Ext3 partition and a 1.5 swap partition (Ubuntu seems to want a partition it can use SOLELY for virtual memory, so I decided not to argue with it.

Since I'd already formatted both partitions in Windows, I decided not to format them again during the Ubuntu installation and was rewarded with a rather spectacular crash that displayed all kinds of interesting and meaningless information about improperly initialized variables and missing environment settings. After a reboot, I let it format the partitions and it's been happy ever since.

Since my access point uses WPAPSK/TKIP encryption instead of WEP, I then spent most of the morning learning to use the console and various combinations of sudu, make, and config scripts attempting to compile the ralink driver for use with my kernel before becoming conversant enough to learn that the driver was, in fact, included with the Dapper Drake 6.06 distribution and required only that I edit a file in /etc/ to initialize my network connection.

Getting Ubuntu to mount and read my NTFS volumes correctly was actually much simpler (I'd spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to do this with Red Hat some months back).

Outside of the fact that I'm going to have to compile a driver for my video card (and figure out how, if needed, to remove grub as a boot manager, although it's working fine and should my Ubuntu install go tits up tomorrow, continuing to use it would be no greater hardship than the Windows boot menu imposes), my initial impressions are that the dialogs provided during the installation are a little too terse, particularly with respect to what setting up partitions for the O/S really entails, but much more importantly, that having some kind of internet connection post-install is critical. In a pinch, I could have just popped in a 56.6 and hopped on any free internet provider, but the gist of it is that a great many of the components available for Ubuntu (and needed to operate it correctly after it is installed, in some cases) are not available from the distribution CD itself.

With respect to the fact that I intentionally made the installation difficult for myself and have a somewhat non-standard hardware setup, I personally could not give it a passing score for the mom test -- in a perfect world, when everything works from the get-go and nothing ever breaks, no problem -- but that's equally true of ANY O/S, and as we all know, the only thing true of ALL software is that even when there's not a single bit of extra data or software in the machine to conflict with it, it will BREAK sooner or later. Certainly one can always throw the box in the back of one's car and cuss and pound on it in one's leisure, leaving mom to nag about when she can get it back to check her email, but as clever as Linux is (this is nicely evident in the fact that drivers can be distributed as source code, allowing them to be compiled differently depending on which platform they're installed to), the "cost of support" seems likely to break even with Windows/OSX.

Fortunately, the idea of spending much time at the command line and writing scripts is both familiar and appealing, so hopefully the learning curve will flatten out for me sooner than it might otherwise.

In closing? I think Joao's right; once I've trashed this install, if not as soon as I get my nvidia working right, I'm going to make a bee-line for Kubuntu. Batch files and such notwithstanding, visually Ubuntu seems to have found a middle of the road compromise that's slightly more sophisticated than Xubuntu but just not eye-candy enough in this day and age. After (naturally) playing around with the themes and creating different gradients for the desktop background, I can't help but be reminded of GeoWorks. Certainly, I lusted after GeoWorks to the extreme of nearly accepting a Sears card to buy a Packard Bell bundled with it (the powers that be were watching over me when they declined my application), but I think I'm probably going to wind up being a KDE kind of guy...

I have a lot of respect for open-source, at least from what little actual open-source development as I've been exposed to. The subject calls to mind the old saw about betting on the rabbit and not the fox in a race; the fox is only running after his dinner, the rabbit's running for his life.

Not in that there's any desperation inherent in free software, but rather that however inconsistent, there tends to be a lot more opportunity for creativity to flourish where someone is free to pursue their bliss, as opposed to simply making a living. Certainly, for the best of us, there's only a couple of degrees separation between the two, but often it's quite a few more degrees than that over the long haul.

It'll be interesting to see what either camp does in developing for 64bit systems and new hardware, but I think linux has an edge in that there will be more productive gains made with distributed computing in the immediate to mid-range future.

Yep, KDE is going to premiere on my old Mac soon...Xubuntu is just too poor for a once graphically very nice machine. But slowly on the backburner some other project is taking shape. A Media Center. I've just bought a 40 inch LCD TV and in my neck of the woods there's no HD feeds yet. Neither HD DVD is available. So, I started to think that a hi quality video machine is beginning to make sense. I've heard a lot about Myth Tv, and naturally, it started to become another front to open on the Linux adventure. At first I was thinking of finding a mini mac for this. Silent and small makes it very atractive to the job. But they're just too expensive for this. And it's also impossible to add a tuner card (only external via USB...). So, I'm planning to build one. Happily, I've got the good fortune to have, in my work, a computer controlled router (a milling machine...), so I'll be building the box too, either in acrylic or aluminum.
If anyone has some experience on this using Linux, now is the time to come forward...

What kind of resolution do you get with your TV?

I used to work in a machine shop, back in the day, and if I still had access to the floor, I'd be thinking case mods made to .010ths tolerance, too.

I just (tentatively) installed an old SB live and hooked up my Roland midi keyboard (when I get paid, the SB will morph into an Audigy with a bay panel -- the live was a great card in it's day, but that day has passed...).

All of which was a departure from doing anything with Ubuntu, but much of the time involved was cleverly multitasked along side a thorough spring cleaning. Though I haven't had a chance to look for it, yet, I am hoping to discover that the tracker scene is alive and well on Linux, or at least a suitable equivalent.

1366X768

It's this one:
http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowProduct.action?product=KDL-40S2010&site=odw_en_GB&pageType=Overview&category=TVP+LCD+TV

Well, not really, it's the S2000E (here's the page in portuguese) http://www.sony.pt/view/ShowProduct.action?product=KDL-46S2000&site=odw_pt_PT&pageType=Overview&category=TVP+LCD+TV

I'm thinking portable. If I can find a portable motherboard, I can cram it into a very slim shaped box. Where can I find a used mobile, with the LCD broken for next to peanuts?... hmmm... ebay?

OK. Edgy is out. And my iBook has made the switch to Kde. Kubuntu is a bit more acomplished than Xubuntu. Not that you can't do everything you want under Xfce. Anyway the clean interface of Xubuntu is kinda cool. Kde is a bit over the top. In that respect, Gnome is a bit more contained.
Anyway, 6.10 is out too for Kubuntu too. And I'm upgrading it. Just hope that doesn't hog the 500mhz G3.

PS. did you noticed how me and Max just took over this thread? Where is everybody?

W00t. And me, I'm just sifting through package manager and seeing how much I can leech in one sitting.

On the plus side, I am posting this from inside my ubuntu partition, which is rapidly becomming as familiar and comfortable as Windows.

I love Ubuntu, though not as much as OS X.  I'm currently using it to do tasks that would otherwise overload my shared web server .  I also like to log in every once a while to play around with it.  My only main gripe is that you have to edit configuration files to get resolutions over the 1024x768. 

Ubuntu seems to want a partition it can use SOLELY for virtual memory, so I decided not to argue with it.

It works better in its own partition, less searching around the disk mixed up with all the other data.  You should do the same thing when you set up a Windows machine.

I tried the new Kubuntu and didn't really like it.  Gnome is much simpler and easy to navigate.  I'm sticking with Ubuntu.  One thing, if you installing on a wide screen notebook, it may not display right.  I couldn't get Kubuntu to display the proper wide screen resolution.  Suse, on the other hand, configured the same notebook properly.

OK,
I see that ease of USE is a major concern...
HOW about power?

Which of the distributions can do the most, and which is the fastest when configured properly??