geek joy!

i installed ubuntu linux on my laptop.

all my computer-related geekage is about 7 years out of date, and the laptop's pretty new with not-so-plug-n-play drivers, so it's been an adventure.

as of this morning: wireless works (the biggest fight! i had to ndiswrap a winxp driver, which i couldn't find in 64-bit -- vista drivers freeze el laptop; a few other issues finally led me to install 32-bit ubuntu. who needs dual processing when the system's not being dragged under by windows anyway?), dvd player works, things are pretty. i just discovered that picasa comes in linux flavor now too. life is nifty.

sound still doesn't work, but it will just as soon as i grab a well-supported usb sound card. and lots of people with the same card are complaining, so i wouldn't be surprised to see it supported soonish.

figuring out linux again is kinda like total immersion in a foreign language. well, total immersion with access to google. i get an error, i go copy it into google, i find someone else who got the same thing, find out what "they" said to do about that, eventually the random attack commands start to make sense in contexts.

now if only it weren't so freakin' time-consuming!