I am now using Linux on both the tablet PC and the R2HV. Unfortunately on my system the Vista partition ended up being around 90 MB which is a big waste. I have a few things to try to shrink it more, but I think it might just have to stay that way. I find my self booting into windows for a few tasks, but now that I have most of my hardware working I am pretty happy. Artrage 2.5 is running fine using Wine. It was difficult to get the tablet going, because Wacom linux does not currently have a completed USB Tablet PC driver. Thanks to the people in the Ubuntu forums, I have a dev build working and it is a little bit quirky but mostly OK. I really miss the fingerprint scanner. Hopefully the fprint project will lead to some sort of fingerprint activated password manager for linux someday soon. I like scanning my finger rather than typing usernames and passwords manually over and over for each application and website.

I have spent more time at a command prompt in the past few weeks than I have since the 80's and early 90's. It is really nice to be working on such a deep level with the OS again instead of being a bystander as windows sort of forces you to do. Now I have to catch up in flickr and LJ since I have been so absent of late.

I installed Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) on milanya's R2HV1 over the weekend, the intention was to dual boot with Vista, but unfortunately booting into Vista destroyed the partition with Ubuntu and hosed the grub loader. She had backed everything up so we decided to go full Linux on the machine and things are working well. (Though we don't have the fingerprint reader, the GPS, or the webcam working yet.) It has sound and network capabilities, and the applications she needs for school are now functioning. I have decided that in order to really get everything else up and running on her system, I need to have a computer with Ubuntu as well so that I can tinker at will. I am backing up everything on my TX2000z right now to prepare for the change. I have all my lectures on a USB memory stick with the portable apps suite installed so I should be OK for class on Thursday evening, even if my whole system goes down. I have read that ArtRage2 works great with Wine on Ubuntu so I should be able to use it. Wacom recently updated their USB Tablet PC driver so I should be able to get it to work. Off the top of my head those are the only windows concerns that I have. (I have pretty much adapted my photo-work to GIMP and my office work to OpenOffice.) If everything goes well I will convert all 6 of our computers over to Linux by the end of the year and be MS-free and mostly open source. The Ubuntu Education Edition looks like it might be great for the kids computers. There shouldn't be too much upset as long as I can get Wine to work running their PC games.