Wubi – The Easiest Way to Linux
Wubi is a Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, Wubi is for you.

I’m not afraid, that’s for sure.  I haven’t managed to get this working, yet, although I only really gave it a cursory try.  It didn’t work the first time, but I think that may be my fault somehow, and then I had to get back to another project.

I did get far enough in the process, though, to realize that it’s got serious potential.  It used a disk image and the Windows boot file instead of having to repartition my drive and install a bootloader.  When it failed, I just uninstalled it, and everything went back to the way it had been before I started.

Has anyone else tried this?  Does anyone else want to try this?

I’m also going to have to make up for the lost sleep, I fear.

Now I have to sort through 500GB of files.  And it would be nice to get Fuppes back up and working so I can stream media to the XB360.  And I should get enough of my home directory restored on the new server that I can use it for voice chat.  Thank goodness that the mail, web and chat servers are offsite now.

(A quick note to those who may be considering installing Ubuntu on a Mac Mini:  It’s not quite as straightforward as installing Ubuntu on another computer.  I have it set up to automatically boot into Ubuntu, and it’s working great, but it took some work, some extra software, and plenty of failed boots before I got to this point.  And, of course, editing some configuration text files, which I understand can be a turn-off for some people.  I also can’t freely boot into Mac OS, lest I have to disable the ext3-formatted USB drives.  That’s okay by me, though – I don’t plan on booting into Mac OS. If you’re considering duplicating my project, we can discuss it in the comments!)

It will be awesome.

One way of achieving this result is found in replacing our current, rastered interfaces with vector-based interfaces.

Another way may be found in Text Rendering:

My short answer is while Microsoft uses their aggressive hinting there will be no higher than 100 DPI resolutions, period. With the Microsoft approach there is simply no way to break this vicious circle.

I’m not a big fan of ClearType, although in true Good Doggie fashion, I am trying to learn to love it.  It hasn’t turned me completely off subpixel rendering yet, and maybe there is hope.

You may now join me in crying tears of joy.

I ordered a new server at work, and until we have time to get it rolled out [0], it lives on my desk. This server has two 3.2 GHz Xeon processors (for a total of four cores), 4 GB of RAM, and a RAID 5 array totalling 500 GB of disk space. Since it has no OS and no purpose at the moment [1], I’m running Knoppix on it, from RAM. You have never seen Firefox open so fast… [0] This just means one late night at the office, if all goes well.
[1] I’ve only been able to come up with a few menial tasks for it, like compressing large files. It’s kind of depressing to just let it idle on my desk all day.