Woo-hoo for Ubuntu!

May I encourage all you Windows users out there to switch to Linux? It's unbelievably cool. OK, so admittedly it's not as easy to set it up and get it working. But when you do... ah! The power and the glory shall all be yours. [Note to self: check whether that's blasphemous; rewrite if so.]

The prompt for my change (well, not so much a change, since my laptop will still also boot Windows) was the acquisition of a new ASUS Eee PC - a posthumous gift from my wonderful grandma. I must also recommend these very highly - they weigh less than a kilo, cost less than 200 pounds, and just work, straight out of the box. You need to play around with them if you want the standard desktop configuration, but that's easily done. And they ship with Linux (Xandros) installed.

So, after a taster of Linux via the Eee, I decided to take the plunge. All in all, it's probably taken me about ten hours' work to get everything up and running (including partitioning the hard drive, which involves a long time spent defragmenting). Most of that has been dedicated to the wireless card, something which Linux doesn't support hugely well. Still, now it's up and running and I'm quite delighted.

Now, all I have to do is learn regular expressions and the world is mine...