Blogomatic for the people!

I now have Ubuntu running from my hard drive, via Wubi. The 7.10 version of the Wubi installer (a convenient Windows front end for doing the installation) is technically an alpha test, but I had no issues. Basically made my laptop into a dual-boot machine without a lot of partitioning and such. The alpha can be be downloaded from http://wubi-installer.org/devel/minefield/. While 'minefield' doesn't sound to promising, it lets me take a better look at Ubuntu than using the bootable CD. Word to the wise, Wubi asks for a username and password, these are used to set up your Ubuntu account, so be sure to remember them or at least write them down someplace.

Turns out my computer needed only 2 proprietary hardware drivers, one for the ATI graphics acceleration and one for the wireless chipset (Broadcom 43xx). I didn't bother with the soft modem driver. I'm long done with dial-up. Haven't set up the wireless connection yet, I assume it will be similar to the procedure I did the first time when I had just bought the router. If only I could remember how I did it then... anyhoo. The advantages of having a generic laptop (Compaq V2000) with equally generic hardware.

I've also put on a codec pack... how the heck is .mp3 proprietary, anyway? I suppose its one of those de facto standards like, oh, Windows! Snap! Pardon me while I geek out...