Early Christmas Present
I have an early Christmas present, to myself.
Missy decided that my laptop was finally dead enough to warrant an actual replacement. (The screen no longer displays mid-range grey as grey, it's bright blue. The display also goes utterly nuts if you dare adjust the angle of the screen).
She looked for an Eee PC, but none were available. Turns out she managed to get a Compaq C710tu for under $500 (after a cashback). Sweet! I was looking forward to the 7" form-factor, and the flash-only storage, but after looking at what this machine can offer I think this beasty is more useful for the price-point. (DVD burner, for instance!).
Installation
Since I didn't have my Ubuntu CDs that Anton thoughtfully procured before the holidays (they're at work still), I headed to Kerry's.
Since I wanted to eventually pass the laptop down to Missy and re-install Windows, I had to create recovery CDs. (They're too cheap to put them in the box...). That too around two hours, which is bizarre and ridiculous.
A quick reboot later and Ubuntu was running as a Live CD. I poked the installer and quickly answered all of the questions. It wouldn't resize the NTFS partition (not that I cared that much), so I've chosen a ~70GB root ext3 partition.
One neat advantage of using a LiveCD installer is that you can use the machine (eg. play games :) during the install.
Not 30 minutes later, I have my shiny new Ubuntu laptop - tonight I'll be setting up final drivers and migrating files over to it from poor dear kappa, who has little chance for a recovery at this point.
Long Live "theta"