Re: Happy 2010 Winter Solstice!

[Farrell Woods <http://www.comcast.net/~Farrell.Woods>]

Hi Robert,

Sounds like you & Noelle are well this holiday season.  Nancy and I
wish you all our best!

Couple of things caught my eye.

Platforms for Ubuntu: I dug up a Lenovo T60 from the recycle pile at the
office about a year ago.  The symptom appeared to be that after a very
short period of time (either during, or shortly after boot) the system
would hang hard.  Problem was a bad battery of all things!  The machine
ran perfectly on the ac adaptor alone (w/o the battery installed).

Ubuntu works great on this machine!  Suspend/hibernate work out-of-the-
box, and resume from suspend is almost instentaneous.  Sound/network
and even bluetooth work out of the box.  A little digging revealed
a package or two which allowed the fingerprint reader to work as
well.  It's my main machine currently.

Apple etc.: it sounds like you're leaning away from Apple's walled
garden.  Don't blame you for that.  I find myself somewhat seduced
by stuff that is mostly intuitive (as you mentioned) and mostly works.
This evening I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 4.2 and I then hacked cups
on my Ubuntu 10.10/T60 to make AirPrint work.  Of course I need to
have my laptop up and running for this to work but I'm still thrilled
to be able to print from my iPhone w/o having to buy HP's newest
printer.

Windows under Linux: I didn't quite follow the difficulties you
encountered there.  For instance right now I have an older PC that
I built (ASUS motherboard with an integrated nVidia 6150 graphics
chip) which is also running Ubuntu 10.10.  I have VirtualBox running
on this with windoze XP SP3.  That combination seems to run ok.  I can
access the windoze desktop from the T60 via RDP!

Macs: I'm getting tired of fooling with hardware and OSs.  I can do that
but it eats time I'd rather spend elsewhere.  When my current machines
are at their end of life I expect I'll sell my soul to Apple and get an
iMac.  They look soooo nice!

Happy holidays!

	-- Farrell