Its 2:39 a.m. - far past my bedtime on Friday (oops, Saturday now) - so where am I? I'm at my house. So why the title of this post? Because of where I am as far as Operating Systems go. Right now I am running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. For those who aren't familiar, that is the latest Linux distribution from Ubuntu.

    I downloaded the latest Wubi installer - an application that makes it a cinch to install Linux side-by-side with your Windows install without needing to know technical details about partitioning, etc. This was the first time Wubi worked for me. I had tried previously installing it on a Windows 2000 Professional Edition and Windows Vista OS but both times it had given me error messages when I attempted to boot into the OS. But here we are.

    First impressions? Well, the installer was a bit simplistic. Microsoft has taken significant steps forward in making their installer look friendly and aesthetically pleasing. Some work in this area would be nice - and then fall back to the basic GUI if you can't correctly detect the video card, etc.

    The installer was also a bit confusing. As a developer/network engineer I know about things like Perl, PHP, and vim but to the average user the list of applications whizzing by would have been extremely confusing. I can't remember where, but recently I read a review of Ubuntu and the author was noting that one of the largest obstacles still preventing mainstream adoption of a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu is the complexity that still exists in some areas - such as naming and descriptions of applications and updating of those applications. I agree. I'd be scared if words like "DHCP" where skipping by me on the screen and I didn't know what they meant.

    Boots up. I log in (after a few tries, I forget my username and password in the fifteen minutes the OS took to install). The interface is sleek and aesthetically pleasing - I like it. So here I am. I like it and will probably play around with it more.

   The idea that fascinates me most is running VMWare and then having Windows as a virtual layer inside of Linux. Hmmm...