Parnaparnti's Win98 install went well, but the 98 had great difficulty with every piece of hardware on the system except the keyboard and mouse. I decided to try Win XP, knowing that the machine was just within the requirements for it. That install went smoothly, and XP properly detected every device without problem. It runs a bit slowly, but the friend I gave it too seems satisfied with it, and that's what counts.

So Parnaparnti has left my home for a new life. In his place have arrived three new-to-me machines, generously donated by the local library, who now don't have to pay to have someone take them away and recycle them.

The first of these machines has been dubbed 'Adelaide' and has been installed with Win XP and Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The XP did a 98 on me - failing to properly detect the video/display settings. I have a driver disc for that problem, which I'll get to later. Adelaide's primary function is to be my Linux print server; the Windows is there for scanning purposes, as the scanning function of my Epson Stylus combo printer/scanner/copier is reportedly not supported in Ubuntu (and I haven't tried to wrangle with XSane yet, though I plan on it).

I had originally tried to install Lucid Lynx on Adelaide, but the install disc gave me some unusual problems, not the least of which was the fact it would blank the screen halfway through the install process, leaving me unable to interact with the machine at all. So I installed Karmic, which seems to work well. The -14 kernel runs smoothly; the -22 which came with the initial updating does not. Molasses flowing down a glacier would run faster, I think. There are possible solutions to that issue as well, which I've bookmarked and are on my to-do list. For now I'm running -14, which is just fine for my purposes.

The other two machines have not been touched yet. I'll be poking around in those later this month, I hope.

I added a gadget that will hopefully help me track the things I want to get done with Ubuntu. I've started saying 'Ubuntu' instead of 'Linux' all the time because I spend 99% of my time using Ubuntu. I periodically tinker with other distros, but mostly I'm settled into Ubuntu and its various options.

My biggest concern is the wireless card. I have a few options on this task which I haven't completely exhausted yet. Mostly I'm consulting what people have already written on Ubuntu Forums and applying that information to my situation. No luck yet though. As it stands I'm mildly disinclined to fuss too much over the network card because my schedule has me in a room with easy access to wired internet when I'm doing my work. And at other times I've been booting into Windows Vista and running Ubuntu via VirtualBox. I'll get that wireless card sorted eventually. Or I'll take the computer to the computer help guys' store in town. Or I'll get a new wireless card.

I'd love to be able to customise Conky to my heart's content, but I don't understand it as well as I'd like to. I've run into problems trying to set up weather forecast information with it, and all I really want is a nice date/time script (which I now have) and a weather script, which is being evil. I'll work that out eventually.

And once I get Kurdnatta's Ubuntu straightened out (probably meaning a reinstall, blah), I'll focus on setting up XSane so I can run the printer's scanning functions from there and converting him to an entirely Ubuntu machine. Maybe. There are some games I still run on the Windows 98 OS, though I have other options for those, I think.

I've successfully installed two flavours of Ubuntu on virtual machines and via the Wubi installer, and I haven't been disappointed so far. I've learned a lot about Linux, xorg.conf, and the difficulty of getting Linux OSes to see and properly utilise their hardware.

I've determined that Xubuntu might be a bit heavy for my 256M memory PII processor 5GB hard disk space machine (Kurdnatta); it seems to run slower and slower every time I use it. I only wish the system requirements on the Xubuntu site had been written in such a way that I would have not thought this distribution was suitable for my machine. To me, if the recommended is 384Mb memory and I have 256, I think I'm good to go. No mention was made of processor speeds or HD space.

I'm currently experimenting with a few lightweight Ubuntu-based distributions such as CrunchBang and Fluxbuntu.  Through research on the Ubuntu forums, I've determined it might be possible to install a lightweight, custom install of Ubuntu on my old laptop, Parnaparnti.  A Fluxbox install is currently running in VirtualBox on my primary machine.  We'll see how that turns out.