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And I'm really loving it. I spend most of my non-work computer time using Linux, I read slashdot and I get the sudo jokes on xkcd. It's good to be part of yet another geek subculture.

Anyway, onto the nuts and bolts of it. I started using Vista on my laptop a while ago and, while I liked it for a little while, the performance and the nagging started giving me the shits. A few weeks before Uncle Kev had been telling me about Linux and showed me Ubuntu on his macbook. While it looked kinda cool I wrote it off at the time as "linuxnerdbullshit". When I got the shits with Vista, however, I decided to have a crack at Ubuntu rather than just reinstall XP, which seemed like a step backwards.

So I downloaded an image and loaded it up. One of the really cool things about Ubuntu is that the default image includes a LiveCD. This basically means that when you boot from the CD it loads the whole OS from it. It's obviously a bit slower than an installed operating system, but it's a great way to get a feel for the OS and see that everything in your system has appropriate drivers.

As it turned out for me, everything worked on my laptop (it's a Dell) and I was really impressed with the Gnome UI that comes standard with Ubuntu. I went ahead and installed it in a dual boot scenario. Protip for people migrating from Vista to Ubuntu, the default partition resizer will bone your Vista installation. From all reports it works fine with XP, however Vista does something different with NTFS… or something. Anyway it ended up with me needing to reinstall Vista. Not a big deal since Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions (natively with Feisty, with another thing installed on Edgy) so I could back up all my files.

Install process for Ubuntu went flawlessly. It automatically installs Grub, which is a bootloader which lets you choose between operating systems upon bootup. Everything Grub related is automatically configured, however when I reinstalled Vista it overwrote the master boot record and fubarred Grub. I used the Ultimate Boot Cd to get back into Ubuntu and it was then a fairly trivial matter to fix it up. I forget how exactly, but google is your friend here.

While I did initially set it up as a dual boot, I've been using Ubuntu almost exclusively since I installed it. When I tried to boot Vista a couple of weeks ago I realised it had actually been expired for some time. There's nothing I miss about XP and only two things I miss about Vista. I really like the start-menu-search feature of Vista and Office 2007 is great. However, I really hated the constant goddamned nagging of Vista. XP SP2 was bad enough but Vista takes it to a whole new level. I read a blog a while ago that lambasted (isn't that a great word?) Microsoft's nagware approach to security. The reasoning being that if you give someone a security notification every time they try and perform the most benign of tasks, they cease to become imporrant security warnings and start becoming "some crap I need to click in order to get my work done". They already annoyed competent users that understand security, and now they don't even serve to educate standard users who have no idea what's going on.

Ubuntu, I feel, has the balance right. It's secure-by-default so it still asks for a password when you modify system settings and things like that. However, there's none of this garbage about asking you twice whether it's okay to open a file you've just downloaded. Also, there's no need for virus scanners since with Linux vulnerabilities are patched as they become apparent.

Since my first install of Edgy I've done a bit of tweaking. I used the beta of Feisty for a while, then ended up upgrading once the final release became available. I've also toyed with a few applications and plugins, which I'll detail in another post.

To sum it up, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu for anyone not entirely satisfied with windows. Even if it's just some tiny thing that bugs you, fire up a LiveCD. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. It's really easy to get a hold of (no more Linux of old, no manually mounting drives) and really easy to use. Get it done.

This is a very simple dish but damn tasty. Amply serves two in these quantities.

Ingredients:

• Mussels. Dunno how many, depends how hungry you are I suppose.
• 2x tins of crushed tomatoes
• 4-6 good sized cloves of garlic
• 1 medium sized white onion
• 1 large red chilli, seeds removed
• 1 handful of parsley
• 1 handful of basil
• About half a bottle of white wine
• 30 grams of butter Chop your garlic, onion and chilli. It seems like a lot of garlic, I know, but it works. Put a good bit of olive oil in the bottom of a large saucepan, season it well with salt and pepper as it heats up. Throw in the chopped ingredients and fry them until a bit soft.

Throw in the tomatoes and simmer for a minute or two, then give it the white wine and the butter. I said 30 grams but that could well be wrong. If 30 grams is a retarded amount use common sense and put in less.

While this simmers away you can use the time to wash and debeard your mussels. If a couple are already open it's no big deal, just so long as they don't look all dried out and gross. Don't forget to stir your sauce while you're doing this, though.

Once the sauce has been simmering for a while and reduced a bit dump in your mussels on top. No need to stir them in since you'll be pulling them back out again soon.

Let the mussels steam for abouy 5-6 minutes being careful not to overcook them, they go like leather. Pull them out with a slotted spoon and stick them in a really big bowl.

Simmer your sauce down some more. You want it reduced, but not to the same degree as something like a pasta sauce. You still want a decent bit of liquid that you can soak up with your bread. It should only take a couple of minutes at this point, you don't want your mussels getting too cold.

Dump the sauce over the mussels and you're done.

Serve with some fresh crusty bread, butter and white wine. We had a Semillon Chardonnay which went quite nicely. You want something with a decent acid structure so that it doesn't get completely overpowered by the garlic, but don't go for a Reisling or anything that hasn't been mallolacitcally fermented. The butteryness of a chardonnay works well with the texture of the sauce.

Sweet chilli sauce stolen from Zarah Maria. This stuff is tasty. It has a different flavour from the sauce you'd buy in a bottle, but that's not a bad thing. It's a much more complex flavour that also tastes fresher. I can't quite describe the "fresher" thing, it just does.

Take:

10 cloves of garlic, peeled 4 large red chilies, stems and seeds removed 3 thumbs of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped 1 thumb of galangal, peeled and roughly chopped 8 lime leaves 3 lemon-grass stems; remove the two outside leaves, discard the top third of the stem and finely slice the remainder 1 cup fresh coriander leaves

Put in a food processor and purée to a coarse paste. It won't really go to a paste since there's not enough liquid, but I can't think of any better way to describe it.

Then put 1½ cups caster sugar together with 4 tablespoons water in a saucepan, place on a moderate heat, stirring well intil the sugar dissolves. When it has, remove the spoon and turn up the heat to full. Boil for 5-8 minutes, do not stir, but of course, don't let the caramel burn either.

Stir in the paste, bring the sauce back to the boil and add:

100 ml cider vinegar 50 ml Asian fish sauce 50 ml tamari

Return to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Pour into sterilised jars, and leave to cool before eating.