Sometimes when it rains it pours.

Last week was like that - computers were having problems all around me, as as I am the person everyone around me turns to when that happens (I'm sure many of you can relate), they all became my problems.

There were three major incidents plus a hardware-related fourth more or less at the same time. The stories of the three are, I think, somewhat enlightening - especially as to the inertia Windows users show when it comes to something...

I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS at work; I'm the only employee doing so, but as I am the sum total of our IT staff I can pretty much do what I want.

Up until yesterday I was using Ubuntu 7.10, but as it recently met the end of its life cycle and Add/Remove wouldn't find packages anymore I decided to install 9.04 in parallel at first.

Installation of the basic system too about half an hour; it imported my Firefox settings from 7.10 but not my Thunderbird profile,...

The university of Paderborn in Germany has announced that they will equip all new students beginning their studies in the upcoming winter term with free netbooks. These netbooks will be purchased with money collected from outside sponsors. Students will get to decide whether they want their netbook equipped with Windows XP or Linux.

I am going to keep my eyes peeled for further news on this, especially how it is going to work out, how many students choose Linux and so on.
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I guess it's now official: I'm an ex-Gentoo user.

I have Ubuntu on my notebook and most people I brought over into the fold I set up with a *buntu as well. I don't care for KDE or Gnome myself, and in Gentoo on my desktop I had Xfce running.

Last Saturday pushed me over the edge.

There was a major upgrade. I had been out of town for half a week so I had skipped one of my two update sessions when I tackled this one. It included recompiling gcc and installing...

The following started out as a comment to this blog entry by Carla Schroder on linuxtoday.com. But it quickly became too long so I decided to simply post it here.

Any interface is a metaphor for what you're really doing: shifting zeroes and ones around. Absolutely everything you ever do on the computer is just a metaphor, whether it's using a GUI, the CLI or even programming.

And like language metaphors, different metaphors are useful in different contexts and apply...