cats

Well, it took a bit of doing, but the new system is now up and running. I'd initially started out using CentOS, but that was a non-starter due to the system using an ICH9 chipset, not yet supported. Enter Fedora 8, which installed like a dream despite this chipset, but was persistently fiddly. especially when it came to installing Skype, which took two hours due to audio drivers not working right (largely because it's a 64-bit system). The final nail in the box was VMware, which installed (barely) but then killed the whole of Linux rather badly. I'd tried KVM virtualisation, but it was sluggish and awkward - my guess is that it was trying to interpret rather than virtualise Windows, since Ubuntu was 64-bit and Windows x86. Who knows, but under VMware the system is running so snappily it is easily outperforming all my old systems. Anyway, finally Ubuntu installed fine, ran VMware fine, ran Skype fine - everything just works. Top marks to Gutsy Gibbon, which yet again shows how easy Ubuntu Linux is to get a system up and running effectively.

Windows was the other part of the story. As the system was delivered with Windows, but I wanted to run Windows within VMware rather than natively (essentially so I could switch between IE6 and IE7, etc., for testing purposes), this should have been easy. It actually was when I just started VMware to boot off the Dell installation disk. Nothing else had really worked, and the copy of Windows I'd used as a temporary attempt to migrate a backup from the original Dell partition to the new VMware system was flaky in the extreme. So eventually it worked out with the clean install from the Dell disk, and Windows XP is running happily within VMware within Ubuntu.

Throughout all this, I have had to cope with two cats - used to be able to roam a large garden - in a one-bedroomed apartment. They're sleeping right now next to me, as good as gold, but Mungo in particular requires a fair bit of wearing out or he just wanders around trying to attack his sister. She doesn't help as she growls as soon as she sees him, which just sets him off even worse. Tomorrow is a statutory holiday here in Toronto, so I even get to spend the whole day with the fluffy-bottomed so-and-sos.

So which is more annoying, computers or cats - answers on a postcard please...