You know, my life is busy enought with “normal” activities without the random emergencies that keep popping up.

Somehow, my wife managed to get the SurfSidekick installed on her computer. ‘Tis an annoying piece of software that causes random advertisements to load up one’s browser, no matter what you happen to be doing. I ran Ad-Aware and Windows Defender on the system, but no matter what I did, the software kept resuscitating itself. Finally, I told my wife to save every important file she had to my file server, and I wiped out her system.

Not wanting to have to go through that pain again, I tried installing one of the newer upstart Linux distributions, Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on the Debian distribution, which, though I’ve never used it, I’ve heard very good things about. I downloaded the torrent and burned it onto DVD. Then I loaded it up.

It loaded up very clean, and only one error showed up after it was installed. Unfortunately, this error was that the computer couldn’t connect to the Internet. My wireless card didn’t work. No problem… fired up Google and found out that the prism2 drivers just need to be initialized before they’ll work. There is an entire support group working towards getting wireless cards to work in Linux, which is a huge challenge since many wireless manufactures refuse to release Linux drivers.

Anyway, once the system was up and the networking was working, the system works great. Easy point-and-click interface to all the functionality you’ll need to configure, like networking, printers, etc. If you’ve been ready to throw your windows box out the window, or if you’ve got an older computer that doesn’t run well with the newer versions of Windows, I’d recommend trying out Ubuntu…