Jolly Christmas, Golf and Ubuntu

Phew, another belt breaking Christmas at John and Sheena's due to an incessant deluge of tasty treats. Not that I'm complaining of course, though I must admit I'm a little concerned that my svelte figure might not survive both this feast as well as the upcoming scoff fest when we return to Malaysia in February. Guess I'd better dust off those jogging shoes.



Dora picked up a nice set of golf clubs for Christmas from James this year to compliment her rising commitment to the sport. Seems like this could be a family wide initiative as Alison and I ventured out to Oxley Driving Range, inspired by a few brief lessons from John. A few thousand more swings and I reckon we might be game enough to tackle a course.



I would have probably written this post a lot sooner but I've been busy installing and configuring Ubuntu on my laptop. I tried to install Ubuntu on my desktop over a year ago and failed miserably but so far I've been impressed with the latest version of the distro (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon).



Bits that impressed me:

• Live CD installation (being able to use an OS while installing it is definitely an odd experience)
• Great package manager which makes it so easy to install new applications
• Great FREE applications which I might consider gushing about in a future post
• Still able to play World of Warcraft through Wine
• New Compiz windowing system which rivals OSX and Vista in eyecandy
• Did I mention it's all free?

I won't lie, I've had my share of issues setting it all up and I still have a few niggling issues (Bluetooth radio, Sony Memory Stick isn't recognised). Overall though this has been the most promising experience I've had with Linux so far. I've had Linux distributions installed (Mandrake, Debian and Redhat) over the years but always ended up uninstalling them eventually under the weight of incompatibility. It's still early days yet but I think this one just might stick.