I can see clearly now.

Last week I mentioned that I was ill. So ill in fact I didn't get around to saying what was wrong with me until the comments. Gah, it was horrible.

In my slight out of body state, I decided it would be a good idea to try the beta release of Ubuntu. Since installing PCLinuxOS I haven't booted into Vista once, nor have I been tempted to for any reason - everything I needed was right there. My theory was to give Ubuntu another go - if it worked I would give my laptop a clean installation and forget about Windows. If it didn't, I would give my laptop a clean installation of PCLOS and forget about Windows once and for all.

Either way, I wasn't going back to Vista unless something went horribly, horribly wrong, but just to be safe it would be there until the final moment. You know where this is going? Well done. I didn't.

I booted up the Ubuntu LiveCD. I imagine that most people reading this far into this entry know what a LiveCD is, but just in case... a LiveCD is a CD which boots onto your computer without changing anything on your hard disk. You can try out different operating systems without the worry of damaging any of your data. A drawback is that it can be kinda slow until you install it properly - Some come with an option to install the operating system if you like what you see.

I liked what I saw. It is only a beta release, but a late beta (the final version is due out in just a few days), and everything was ticking over nicely. WiFi worked without any configuration whatsoever (apart from my security code, naturally) and it was all pretty fast - faster than Vista which is saying something as until now Ubuntu was still running off the CD.

So I went ahead, and hit install, ready to partition the drive so that I could dual boot and compare and contrast PCLOS with Ubuntu, but keeping Vista there to backup all my emails and whatnot ready for the transfer.

I was working on automatic. Yes! I want to install. Yes! Guide me through it. Yes! Use the entire disk....

...bugger. I really should have paid attention to those options before hitting the "install" button. And the "are you sure?" button.

Ah well, it was going to happen sooner or later. Might as well have been now. Considering that what I am currently writing this blog on is still technically beta, it's very polished - sure, it's constantly updating itself and so it's very nearly the "final" version, but I haven't had a single issue with it so far with a good few days of usage. I really like it.

As I've said before, I've been put off going full hog with any Linux distribution. Part of this is because of an uncertainty over whether I could actually live with it. Now I have no real choice, and I can't say I'm particularly upset.

Now to convince Ween to let me install it on the main PC...