My Ubuntu in action - the not so simple and not quite the best things in life are free (if you forget the money it costs to set up- for routers, second hard drives etc..and the time of course... oh yes...the time...).

One of the ways I've tried to keep my hands occupied over the weeks has been by sitting down at the keyboard of my PC – obviously. Sometimes this has been enjoyable. Sometimes not. I have done a bit of cautious experimenting with the world of Linux and at times I have felt like Nicholson in “The Shining” constantly typing “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” into a Terminal whilst going slowly INNNSSSAAAANNNEEE!!!!!! (R has been a perfect Shelley Duval).

But not always. I always feel nervy about praising it because whenever I'm feeling evangelical about Ubuntu something tends to crop up. I will throw caution to the wind and say it's been really good fun and must have a chance of making inroads into the market. Apparently its Apple that might feel the heat more than Windows as it possesses some of Apple's selling points minus the tie-in to the pricey hardware.

There are loads of times when I rejoice I'm in XP. Feed Demon is a great tool for my minor RSS obsession and its a Windows-only prog but I'm beginning to appreciate the work done at Straw. My first Linux RSS try outs were depressing but things are looking much better.

I have Ipodder the same as I do in XP I have got Opera 9 working (blood sweat and tears there I'm afraid) . I managed to sort out radio streams (an essential for R who likes to listen to AFC Wimbledon match commentary). The whole multimedia area is a bit tricky but a lot of other basic stuff – image editing word processing etc are all there ready to go from the outset. And there's a lot of stuff sitting there waiting for you to play with when you get bored. I've even got, a very slow, Google Earth running on it.

It has its limits. Its strengths are what though? Freedom from the security chores you have with Windows. The freeing of processor power for the same tasks.

I rather like it because it forced a tiny dose of learning on me and, ironically perhaps, has made me discover things in Windows that I didn't know were there such as some windows management features. (Windows management means things like jumping between programs and stopping your screen getting cluttered up with too many things – stuff like that. Linux has lots of great stuff for all that such as multiple workspaces that you can jump between.)

Sorry. Downside is it makes for a very boring post.

Oh ...yes Blogger doesn't like it when I paste over from Open Format Documentsssszzz