In a somewhat lighter vein than of late:

I installed Xandros 3.0 Business Edition for the first time last night. It wasn't perfectly smooth, but it was no worse than a Windows install. The best part is that it worked, and seems to be running very well. I will be using it for my main machine for a while just to make sure it will do everything I need it to do. I have several Windows applications that I need to get running under the (included) Windows emulator, and a couple open source products that I need to download and install the Linux version of. Today on the way home, I will be grabbing a couple 100Mb Ethernet cards. I need to upgrade the 10Mb one in our firewall, and install one in the new Xandros box. Once that is done and known working, I will switch Nestina's machine to Xandros as well. Last but not least, I will switch over the laptop. At that point, I am Microsoft free. I abandoned Office years ago for OpenOffice, and Internet Explorer is only on my laptop so I could use the Windows update site. I don't need that now that Microsoft added automatic updates to Win2K, but it is too hard to uninstall to bother with at this point. When Windows goes away, so will IE.

First impressions: I don't have a good monitor, so I can't really judge the video, but it certainly looks as good as XP here at work. It loads very quickly and the response while I was playing around with it was crisp. As a life-long Microsoft user, I was instantly familiar with how it works. The list of applications that comes with the Business Edition includes almost anything I can think of that I would ever need except a few things. I expect to find those on the internet.

I need to get my big penguin out in the yard tonight to celebrate the coming invasion at the Frost household. This looks like it could be fun.