Every day I love you less and less

I have become increasingly disillusioned and frustrated with Microsoft products, and so once more am boldly setting forth into the world of open source software. Its about 5 years since I last spent any time in the company of Linux, but this evening I installed Ubuntu on my home PC.

I've always had a preference for Debian type distributions. I've tried Redhat and Mandrake, but was introduced to Debian's package management by Storm and Corel, and find it so much more user friendly than RPM (pause for flames from RPM fans).

Anyway, Ubuntu now resides on the second partition of my hard drive, and is completely isolated from the outside world, due to its refusal to recognise my Linksys USB wireless network adapter. I am girding my loins and preparing to enter battle with Ndiswrapper. I think the reason I abandoned Linux last time was problems with USB device support. Hopefully things will have moved on since then.

I am also playing with OpenOffice. I thought I'd give it another try following the State of Massachussetts decision to adopt an open format for its documents. It makes perfect sense - how many times have you tried to read an old MS Office file, to find that the format is no longer supported. Despite Microsoft's protests that it's own XML format is open, the Open Document standard has won through.