Back to the Penguin

I just started vacation from work this weekend and after a day or two to decompress, it was time to start a geek project. I took the old Dell Inspiron e1405 which was just returned from service time at Dell and was hanging around as a spare and slapped a copy of Ubuntu Linux v9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on it, wiping out the recently rebuilt copy of windows xp mce that was on it. It didn't take long to setup, about 25 mins from boot to reboot into Ubuntu's Gnome interface. I was able to find the network printer and print a test page, get to Facebook, Twitter, ESPN and Gmail from within Firefox and after installing the non-free plugins package for Ubuntu, we were ready to roll. Grabbed the latest Java JDK, Eclipse and ruby. Now I just need to figure out what I want to do. I have obtained a couple books from our recent trip to McKay's Used Bookstore: one on java programming and the other on ruby. I have never been real successful with the programming mindset but I keep trying and hoping it will stick.