For various reasons, I installed the newest version of Ubuntu Linux (7.04, or “Feisty Fawn“. No, I don’t understand their version names any more than you do) on my laptop. There were some problems, starting with the fact that the CD-Rs I was using to burn the disc image are terrible, so it took 3 tries to get a working Live CD. Then I realized that, unlike Windows XP Pro, 2000, or Vista, XP Home doesn’t have a way to partition drives, so I had to use gparted to create a new partition, which is awesome. Seriously, it’s a 50 meg ISO with a bootable Linux install - pretty much all it is is a terminal and partitioning software. Really slick. It shrunk the old partition so I could create a new partition, and left Windows working perfectly.

Ubuntu didn’t detect my sound card properly, or my video card. The video card required a driver download, and after some searching of the Ubuntu forums, I found that the sound was hosed because Gateway saw fit to screw the sound up all kinds of ways on these laptops.

So I’m the proud owner of a dual-booting laptop. Yay.

UPDATE: Holy crap, this is awesome. Thanks to some tutorials online and a tiny bit of work on my part, I’m running something that I can only think of as Faux-S X:

This is so awesome it kind of hurts. As soon as I can get the wireless to accept WPA, instead of trying use HURF DURF WEP, I’ll be in good shape.

Oh man, I can totally grep stuff. This rules.

Asshole lawyer/judge loses pants, sues dry cleaner for many ridiculous reasons.