Another Year Older ..... and it's time to get cooking !

Yes, it's Christmas time again - that time of the year when I get older and decide not to cook for the next year. Then comes Christmas Day!

This year the daughter is returning to the fold for a few months, so there's been much moving of things from one room to others so she has somewhere to sleep, etc. What would be her room has been being used as a computer room - not something that will meet with much approval, I suspect, from tomorrow onwards!

Right now, in fact, the room looks more like Mission Control in Darmstadt than a bedroom, There are six screens in all - from a desktop, two laptops with extra screens, and an eeeBox. One of the laptops is my faithful Acer Aspire 9300 - a 17" Windows machine. The other is a new System-76 Bonobo machine - 17.3", 8 core Intel i7, 12 GB RAM, 1 Tb disk. It runs Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows in VirtualBox virtal machines. Life is turning out to be simpler this way, despite the normal hiccups of moving to a new OS.

Not, of course, that Ubuntu is really new to me - the eeeBox has been running 10.04 since it was released - early 2010, I suppose - with the NetBook GUI. Strangely enough, that's rather like the new Unity GUI that 11.10 comes with as default.It's a little bit of a pain atafirst to get used to, and also seems like a step back in time to be using more keyboard short-cuts, but I'm getting used to it. Slowly!

These two Linux machines really are a joy to work with. I run Windows virtually on the laptop because I keep my email in a program called TheBat! - a really good email client from RITLabs in, of all places, Moldova in Europe. As I have about 370,000 emails stashed in there, the store is really quite big, and I'm very happy with the way it all gets organised and kept. Very reliably, I might add! Unfortunately it only runs under Windows - I haven't been brave enough to try WINE!

Anyway, I also have a Windows desktop (under the desk), which I use without mouse, keyboard, or monitor - Vinagre remote control on the newer Linux machine or even in a virtual Windows machine inside the Linux machine will work fine. Only the RDP option works, which Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't have. Oh well - there are benefits to upgrades!

So, now I'm off to pick up some Windows PCs from a friend to disinfect, so the next blog will probably be full of stories of that.

TTFN