This is going to sound like one of those old Jerry Pournelle Chaos Manor columns from the late, lamented Byte. But the weekend didn’t start like that. It actually took a long time to get around to doing the computer work. First of all two writing jobs came in, which you will see the results of next week. Also we had errands to do, and wanted to get plenty of exercise, seeing as how it was a fairly quiet weekend. But by late Sunday afternoon we managed to get going.

I’d been spending the weekend off and on making backups of modeling data on my main workhorse desktop. I finally managed to free up 60 Gb of space on that machine. I then extracted the hard drive from the dead laptop, hooked it up to the desktop, and transferred all of the vital data from it.

Meanwhile we got to work on the Linux install. The machine we planned to put it on was a bust. Although Kevin has bought the machine from work, no one knew that it came armed with an RFID-based security system and would not boot outside the office. We may be able to do something about that, but in the meantime we went to Plan B which involved an old desktop stuck running Windows 98. It was useless like that, but it had enough memory and disk space to run Ubuntu so we gave it a go.

It ran like a dream. I was particularly impressed that Ubuntu was able to access the Internet when booted off the install disk, so you could check support documentation before installing. And we now have a functional web browser, and there’s a whole bunch of other useful programs on it too. The next step will be downloading and installing a LAMP set-up so that I can have an actual Linux-based web environment to test on.

One thing that isn’t working yet is the network. The Ubuntu machine can see that there is a Windows network out there, but it can’t see any of the machines on it, let alone access their public spaces. That may require a little work. But so far so good.

Of course I now want to know where I can get a copy of Kylix…