Posting from da Ubuntu box

(The picture is of an old appartment block in North Point, Hong Kong Island, where my uncle's mother lives. A beautiful sunny afternoon - the pic turned out better than I thought it would, with all the sunlight, daily lives of the inhabitants hanging by their windows...)

There are quite a few non-trivial things still not working, but I'm finally satisfied with yet another Linux installation on my computer, the second of the Ubuntu distro (since the last one crashed on me a few weeks before Asia - to the dismay of other Ubuntu-lovers). Simply, Ubuntu is such a Desktop-based user-oriented distribution that it shouldn't crash, and everything you love on a Windows machine should be available on it, less the fanciness of a Mac (which I would probably get, if I were to buy myself a laptop, but as for desktops, a Mac is out of question, b/c of its lack of raw power, and design is not such an issue (in the portability sense) as it would be for a desktop laptop (a terrible lapsus making the whole sentence nonsensical - but my brain does not compute)).

Speaking of Macs, they successfully ran MacOSX on a Toshiba laptop, but I don't think they're news. Speculating, I would want to be optimistic and think that Apple is going head-on against Windows, on Intel/AMD chips, the i386/AMD64 architectures, which everyone has. It's probably daydreaming, when we consider that the sale of hardware has been the milk cow of Apple for several years. MacOSX on i386 is probably a leak (and I didn't read the recent reports to really know). I am putting my money on another clever marketing trick Steve Jobs pulls out of his ass on regular basis.

Some hopefuls: the iPod with wireless access, so that you can listen to web-streamed radio stations; a Flash memory based laptop, if I understand well that flash memory consumes less energy and is much much lighter than good ol' spindle HDs.

I run Linux now, mostly for work, b/c I was pissed at Cygwin/X not providing easy X-forwarding. Linux is cool b/c of X-forwarding, and not anything else (except the fact that it's free). The big desktop support for Linux is flaky on the latest ATI driver, so I have to rely on an older driver that doesn't accelerate my graphics (so when the really cool Linux-only 3D screensaver collection shows up, it's as if I *didn't* have hardware acceleration...). And b/c I choose to use the full "power" of my 64-bit chip (which really isn't required for the feeble desktop work I do), I don't get Flash, Acrobat or Java runtime to work properly. These are big annoyances people talk about in forums. You software companies can eat my shorts with those penetration rates you boast. :D