OS Update frenzy

I'm not actually off having a life this weekend, and have run out of space on my laptop's linux partition, so am in the process of an upgrade frenzy.

I've archived all the data off the laptop onto my mac, and repartitioned the laptop from 45GB Win/45GB Ubuntu to 20 Win/ 20 Ubuntu/ 55 Data partitions, and will re-install ubuntu and an ext3 driver for Windows so I don't have half my data on one partition and half on the other. It's a real pain that it doesn't come with media for XP, as there's a lot more crap on it that I could get rid of if I could do a clean install (not only in terms of disk space - installing and un-installing some DVD software has left the audio system in mumbling mode), but I don't want to have to pay Microsoft to re-install an OS I've already paid for when I bought the laptop. The two things I use Windows for are games (mainly Runescape these days; maybe the next version of Ubuntu's Java plugin will be more stable) and to stepwise debug C++ code in Visual Studio - I haven't found anything like as good a debugger for linux yet.

My iPod battery died in Romania, and it's still not holding any charge; I'm not sure whether to upgrade that or not - it mainly gets used in my car on a 30 min commute each day, which charges it a bit, and the battery doesn't seem to be designed for that use (or the UI for that matter - you can't change albums either through the iPod or the head when it's plugged in, otherwise it wouldn't be an issue).

Having thought more about nodes for the quad-store, reconnected the three netras in the loft and am installing a clean version of solaris 10 on them, so I can see how it works on true 64bit hardware and server class disks, and don't cook my groin running the cpu in the laptop.

The main reason I don't use the netras much is that they are noisy and use lots of electricity, so I've also ordered an excito bubba, a fanless home server which draws 10W at full load, so can be left on in the corner behind the telly and used for file sharing.

Depending what happens to the laptop and bubba combination, and whether it's worth fixing the iPod, I may get rid of the mac, since the only thing I use it for that's OS X specific is re-installing the iPod's software when it goes wrong (which it does a couple of times a month), and archiving my mail accounts (which the bubba does automatically).



TME