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Everyone wants to become Google these days. In a way. Google runs Linux. A lot of enterprises, from banking to health care, are now looking to deploy gigantic Internet-facing applications to customer sets numbering in the tens of millions. (Government, too.) The biggest and best IT system suppliers are gearing up for what they call “cloud” computing. IBM floated its offering today. It runs Linux.

Ars Technica is one of the best Web sites out there in the technology space. Period. Their Apple, Microsoft and gaming "journals," as they call them, are of high quality. I refer to them often. OK, not the gaming one, but the other two, definitely. I've said for awhile that they need to get a Linux journal. Now they have.

Read all the way to the bottom of this iTWire article about low-cost pre-loaded Linux systems -- the Asus and Everex -- and you'll learn, as I did, that Everex is planning a pre-loaded Linux laptop.

So giddy was I that the OpenBSD CD agreed to boot on my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (with a VIA C3 Samuel processor that wouldn't allow the install of FreeBSD, NetBSD, DesktopBSD or PC-BSD) that I immediately launched into an install today. Whoa. I can't remember an installation process that was this geeky. You MUST have the instructions in front of you, or you will get nowhere fast.

I love the whole idea behind BSD. Supposedly, unlike Linux, there are real adults working in a more rational, less chaotic manner on the various distros (including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and the FreeBSD offshoots PC-BSD and DesktopBSD). But when it comes to actually trying to install and run BSD, I've hit plenty of roadblocks.

As one of the ways to keep track of my journey through the world of Linux and BSD distributions, on every CD, I try to write the date I burned it. I can't remember how I found out about my first Linux live CD, Knoppix 5.1.1 (some Web story must've gone on about how great it was to run a full Linux without doing a hard-drive install), but the date I wrote on the case is Jan. 29, 2007 -- soon after the 5.1.1 release came out. And it wasn't just my first live CD, it was also the first Linux CD of any kind I made -- and my first experience with a Unix-like operating system since leaving adm3a and VT-100 terminals behind after my college days in the 1980s.

I figured I would try to upgrade my Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty setup on the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client to Gutsy 7.10. It's no secret that Xubuntu has, in its short life (6.06 was its first release, I believe) never been as polished -- nor has it received as much polishing attention -- as the flagship Ubuntu. But for older hardware, Xubuntu can mean the difference between a good 'Buntu experience and the other kind.

Say what you will about retail's looming giant, but Wal-Mart's got stones. It's doing what no other mass-market retailer dares to do: offering low-cost PCs with Linux instead of Windows. The company, which has sold Linspire-powered Linux PCs in the past, has gotten back in the Linux-box game with an Everex system that includes the PC itself, along with mouse and keyboard (but no monitor) for $198, as I read in a report from DesktopLinux.com.

Gutsy is running fine -- at times -- on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 256 MB RAM, 1.3 GHz Celeron). I say "at times" because sometimes power management works, sometimes it doesn't. That part is a bit troubling. It was going fine for awhile, but then I ran a couple of live CDs, some successful, some not (Mepis 6.5, Ubuntu 6.06, DSL 3.3). None of the live CDs ran as well as Ubuntu 7.10, given the latter's superior hardware detection and handling. But after running Mepis (and the live CD probably has nothing to do with it), I rebooted into Ubuntu 7.10 and the fan kept on running. I put the laptop into suspend mode, and when I came out of it, the fan stopped.

It's Gutsy day, and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy is now available. Check the Ubuntu home page for info, or go directly to the 7.10 tour page for everything that's changing in Ubuntu. Doing a Ubuntu upgrade -- especially trying to get a full ISO file -- on day 1 is, if not pure folly, mostly folly. So recheck this entry throughout the day as I report on my Gutsy progress.

So far, Ubuntu is outpacing Debian on the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 that I resurrected from the dead by replacing its shattered power plug. While both Debian Etch 4.0 and Ubuntu 7.04 are doing fine in the power-management department, Ubuntu is pulling ahead when it comes to touchpad and mouse configuration.

I never read the manual. That can be a detriment in Slackware, baffling at the command line, soul-killing in FreeBSD (OK, that's just my experience) and ... just slightly irritating in Ubuntu. I have saved network settings for home (dynamic IP) and the office (static IP) -- a feature that didn't work at all in Xubuntu but is operational in Ubuntu 7.04 -- but I was baffled as to why, when changing from one of the saved settings to the other, the change would not go into effect unless I rebooted.

After months of intermittent use of Xubuntu on my less-capable converted thin client (I always liked Xubuntu, for the record), I decided to put the standard Ubuntu on my new, old $0 Laptop in anticipation of the 7.10 Gutsy release of the popular Linux distribution in, at this writing, three days.

Now that I'm running a 1.2 GHz Celeron-equipped laptop with way better video support than my 1 GHz converted thin client -- both with 256 MB of RAM -- for my Linux and BSD tests, I'm finding that Windows XP isn't as fast as I once thought it was on my work-provided Dell 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM. Yep ... a fast Linux (Debian, Slackware, Puppy) on a slower system easily beats Windows XP on a faster box when it comes to many common tasks, from rebooting to shutdown, loading Firefox and OpenOffice, all the way down to switching between windows and having their graphics fully rendered.

I have a Perl script to check the outgoing links from blogs for me, via planet sites. Yes, the planets aggregate the blogs, and the script snarfs the links from the planets. I'm so meta it hurts. So I have a bunch of link data, going back a little more than a year. This particular list doesn't even indicate whether or not I read your blog, just whether or not enough people whose blog copy my Perl script grabs from aggregator sites link to you.

After being disappointed by Puppy 2.16 and Damn Small Linux 3.3's lack of ability to run on the $0 Laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450 -- and then being able to run Zenwalk 4.6.1 but neither Vector 5.8 nor Slackware 12, I didn't hold out much hope that the new Puppy 3.00 -- said to be compatible with the current release of Slackware -- would run at all.

After futzing around with the $0 Laptop for the past week or two, I'm tired. So I left the damn thing in the car (it's running Xubuntu 7.04 after display issues made me give up on Slackware 12). I don't quite know what to run on it. I'll probably put Ubuntu 7.04 on it in anticipation of 7.10. So I fired up the converted thin client -- the Maxspeed Maxterm with VIA C3 1 GHz and 256 MB RAM -- and ran Debian Etch. It's like a comfortable, old shoe.

Sure Zenwalk was doing all right on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM). But I had Partition Magic, and it was time to divide the / partition in half to dual-boot. My first test was PC-BSD 1.3 (I've had the CD for a few months.) It's the first BSD I've ever been able to boot. ... Big surprise: Unlike Zenwalk, PC-BSD has some kind of laptop power management implemented. The fan finally fell silent, only turning on occasionally.

Remember yesterday, when I was railing against -- in no particular order -- Gateway, Ubuntu, Puppy, the Alps touchpad and Vector? A cooler head prevailed today. I stuck with Zenwalk 4.6.1. I may even install the 4.8 release candidate.

I consider myself to be a born geek. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to do cool geek things: woodworking, auto mechanics, gunsmithing, electronics—you name it; if it involved building things or taking them apart and putting them back together, that was my heart's desire. I drooled over Shopsmiths, Heathkits, and all the neat stuff in Radio Shack. The most fun in the world to me is understanding how things work and then changing or fixing them.