I feel pretty good. Just took me a little while, but I was just able to get Ubuntu Linux to dualboot with my already existing installation of Vista on my laptop. The hardest thing was getting my damn headphone jack to work!! I could get sound to play from my laptop speakers, but when I plugged headphones into the jack, sound would just continue to play from the speakers. Took a little while to find the fix online, so I've posted the fix here. (assuming you have a Realtek ALC861-VD soundcard. If you have a sony vaio, replace "hp" with "vaio" in the steps below.)

Run this command to open the alsa-base config file... (replace gedit with whatever editor rocks your world)

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

...then add the following line on the end...

options snd-hda-intel model=hp

...save, close, reboot, and enjoy tunes directly into your ears.

Was in a mood to tinker today. I've had an idol PC sitting around for a while now, so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on it. So far, I like what I see. It was very easy to install. Just downloaded an iso from www.ubuntu.com, burned it to dvd, booted from the dvd drive, then installed, and all my hardware seems to be working fine. Ubuntu includes a packaging system that makes adding/removing software very easy. In the screenshot below, you can see i have Firefox, Pidgin (multi IM client), terminal (used it to run the Adobe Air installer because it doesn't use the packaging system), Twhirl (twitter client), Gnometris (tetris clone), and the standard Ubuntu File Browser.



I'm definitely impressed with how easy it is to get up and running with Ubuntu. Last time I used Linux was the RedHat distro in college in '96 through 2001. I could definitely see Ubuntu being a great place to do web development (assuming I wasn't using ASP.NET).