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April 26, 2007

Author Boy Deeply Chuffed after Week's Work

I've been banging the flippers at the keyboard all week and today passed the magic 10,000-word mark. I've finished the first three chapters, and started on the fourth--and it's only Thursday! Tomorrow I'm hoping for another 1500 to finish the week in winning style.

This is all good, and certainly good for a writer who's spent a lot of time in recent months doubting himself (I've only had to delete 500 words so far, much less than I was expecting), but the thing I'm particularly chuffed about is this:

On April 19th the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, 7.04, code-named "Feisty Fawn", was released. I immediately began downloading said software via Bittorrent. Our broadband data allowance for the month had long expired, so were stuck with a speed of only 28.8kbps. Downloading the 700MB of 7.04 took just under a week. Ugh.

Then it was a simple matter of burning the resulting ISO file onto a CD-RW (and it really was dead easy), backing up my mail folder, my Firefox bookmarks, and everything else I wanted to hang onto (including the file for my book), and then I set about the installation process for the upgrade.

First, I wanted to go back to having the computer set up as a "dual-boot" machine, with half of the HD containing Windows XP, and the other half containing Ubuntu. This means installing WinXP from scratch, then partitioning the hard drive into two halves, and formatting the second half to accept Linux. This done, I bunged the 7.04 CD into the drive, and restarted the computer. It booted the "Live CD", which worked perfectly, and I started the installation.

Result: it's like I've got two computers: a Windows box when I need to do things there (mostly games), and a very cool Ubuntu box for everything else. Ubuntu also makes it dead easy (much easier than my previous Linux distro, Fedora Core) to install all the relevant codecs, drivers and other software you might want that don't come on the CD. The first thing I added to the install was the word processing package, Abiword, a simple, lean and mean program that goes like the clappers, has none of the dreadful clutter of MS Word (or even Open Office.org Writer, for that matter, which I had been using). And did I mention that Ubuntu, like all other Linux distributions or "flavours", is free? And contains everything you need, including an office suite and much else as well as the OS? Phwoar! :)

This all meant that I was able to continue working on the book while also updating my Linux installation, without having to take a day off for computer hassles. I was so chuffed! :)

Posted by adrian at April 26, 2007 07:20 PM

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Posted by: Charlie at April 28, 2007 05:06 AM

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