It's been a ... very long time since I've written anything here. Rather than writing a bunch of boring excuses and explanations, I'm just going to jump right back in.

10 years ago I got my first exposure to Linux, and I fell in love. Almost immediately I shoved Windows behind me and jumped in with both feet. Slackware was my choice, and continued to be for quite a while. As time passed, however, I became less interested in maintaining my computer, and more interested in just using it as a tool. I got lazy, and wanted things to 'Just Work'. I can be moody like that. Eventually I began to drift back into the Windows world. I pretended for a while that I was bridging the gap by having my machine dual-boot. But before long the ext2 partition shrunk to nothing, and Fat32 took over again.

In the years since then, I have drifted back and forth, dabbling in Linux, but never having the commitment to jump right in. Partly this is because I didn't want to try out the more 'user friendly' versions, and instead stuck with Slackware, and then Gentoo. Finally, after buying a new computer, and spending a few months getting frustrated with Vista's memory consumption, I decided to do an experiment. So, yesterday, I downloaded the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron. By the middle of the day I had my system up and running and was working in Visual Studio within a virtual machine. The difference was unbelievable. The whole process didn't take much longer than it would have taken to install Windows and get it set up properly. Long gone are the days of researching every minutiae of your hardware, finding the right modules, editing multiple configuration files, and compiling your kernel before you can even boot a workable system. That flexibility is obviously still there, but choosing Linux no longer requires you to dig that deep. (Now, I realize that my thinking is probably antiquated, and it is likely that it has been this way for a while. I have probably just been too stubborn to try a version of linux that didn't assume you WANTED to do all that configuration on your own.)

Anyway, that's all for today. It's been far too long since I've written anything at all, and although this isn't a technical post, it's something. If you're curious, for virtualization I chose KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine). It is the default choice for Ubuntu, and after some research, I decided that it was a good choice. It's integrated directly with the kernel, and as such runs closer to the hardware than a lot of choices. It is also able to take advantage of your processor's virtualization features. After going through the process, I now sit here unscathed, and I can definitely say that it was a good choice. If you're interested, here are a few links that I found helpful. (searching for information relating to KVM produces a lot of noise, so it can be tough to track down helpful info) 

•  General Setup Info
• Providing the Guest OS Access to the CDROM During Installation

And finally, a screenshot of my desktop with XP and Visual Studio running: