Despite the lack of blog entries, I have actually been swimming.  I swam Wednesday and Thursday.  I even mixed it up a bit and did some over-unders and some sprints.  My fastest 50 was 0:30, which is pretty sad, and my 100 wasn’t any better at 1:05.

I’ve had a serious lack of computer connectivity as of late.  We just moved into our new house and I have only setup the phone and wireless.  My old Power Mac doesn’t have wireless, so I won’t be blogging from there until I wire up the ethernet jacks and buy a new switch for the basement.  Even my work machine has been down a lot lately.

I’ve finally given up on getting XEN to work with my NVIDIA card.  I can hardly wait until AMD releases the ATI driver stack as open source and forces NVIDIA to do the same.  What a bunch of morons.

Josh finally moved from Windows to Linux at work as well. Corey was helping him get all setup on his Dell Precision 380 (the same machine I have).  Josh was complaining about how hard it is to setup Linux on these boxes (because they can’t include the proprietary NVIDIA driver in the distribution).

After giving up on getting XEN working with NVIDIA, I decided I might run Windows as the base and then do something like colinux or parallels on top of that.  I decided to be a bit bold and dropped in my Windows Vista RC1 DVD.  It booted up and said it couldn’t install because I don’t have a hard drive.  I wasn’t extremely surprised that Vista doesn’t have a good set of drivers yet, but I sort of thought they would be in the “Release Candidate.”

After failing with Vista, I decided to put Windows XP back on the machine.  I figured that should be easy, since XP was pre-installed on the box when we bought it.  Booting with the Windows XP CD yielded the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death).  It became extremely clear that it is easier to install Linux than Windows, at least on relatively new Dell hardware.

So I thought there must be some drivers I have to install at the beginning of the XP setup so that it can succeed.  I quickly installed Kubuntu and went to Dell’s website to find the drivers.  There are no less than 6 drivers that I have to supply during XP setup to get this thing to install.  What a joke.  And to make this process easier, Dell has packaged all their drivers in self-exracting archives that only work on Windows.  So without a Windows machine I will not be able to get the drivers that will enable me to install Windows.  Brilliant.

I decided to stick with Kubuntu.  It does almost everything Windows does, plus a whole lot of things that Windows can’t even hope to do.  If only it had a better groupware (email, calendar) client.  I can’t stand Evolution.  It crashes about 35 times a day (not exaggerated).  For now I’m using rdesktop to connect via RDP to a virtual windows machine running on a headless box in another office.  Then I have Outlook on that machine.  It’s not ideal, but it sure beats Evolution.

Wow, almost nothing about swimming in this post.  Oh well.