We're traveling to Spain and Ireland for three weeks. I'm bringing the netbook, not the 17" MacBook Pro, because it's small and light. It doesn't have a DVD player and I'd like to bring some DVDs to watch. I could either spend about $80 on an external DVD player, or I could rip the DVDs beforehand.

I've ripped a few DVDs with Handbrake, an open source, cross-platform video transcoder, which seems to do a good job. I'm playing them in the cross-platform VLC player, which released version 1.0.0 yesterday, after almost 8 years of development.

Google finally released the much-anticipated Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I've tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not antialiased on Linux.

As a user, I'm happy to see that there is real competition between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web developer, it's a pain to have so many browsers to test.

I spent much of today playing around with the brand-new Jaunty/9.04 release of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Eee 1000H netbook. Previously I had run the Hardy/8.04 version of Ubuntu Eee on this system. I had never bothered to update to Intrepid/8.10, but now that UNR is fully supported by Canonical, I thought it was time to try it out.

I downloaded the UNR image last night onto my Mac, and transferred the image to a 1GB USB stick this morning. (The Mac instructions required a little tweaking.)

I spent some time running the Live Image first, before clean installing. Everything worked seamlessly except the microphone. WiFi worked, the webcam worked, sound playback worked, the touchpad was configured in a sane way. All of these were problems for me when I first installed Ubuntu Eee. That they worked now was not too surprising, since the Asus Eee 1000 is a Tier 1 supported system, but it's nice to get the confirmation.

One of the first things to strike me about the Live Image was how nice the fonts looked. I'm sensitive to typography and the default font hinting settings on previous versions of Ubuntu have always looked like crap: spindly and awkward. I found it hard to take seriously an operating system that looked so unprofessional. The Jaunty font hinting yields thicker letters, which look a lot more like the Mac's shape-preserving font rendering, though not as good. The main exception, oddly enough, is the font used in the netbook-launcher, which looks jagged.

I went ahead and installed Jaunty. The installer offered me an option to install Jaunty side-by-side with the existing operating systems, Ubuntu Eee 8.04 and Windows XP. I wanted to overwrite the existing Ubuntu partition and I had to jump through several hoops to make that happen. The partition editor is pretty and an improvement over GParted. The timezone picker is also very slick, with a clickable world map.

Partitioning aside, the installation was quick and painless. JPierre has a useful guide to some issues that he ran into.

I've spent most of the afternoon and evening installing various applications that I care about. Sleep and hibernate just work now. Sleep worked before but there were always some obnoxious errors when going to sleep.

As a hardcore Vim user, I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. Alt+Tab (or Apple+Tab) is my primary method for switching between applications on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I had never found a keyboard shortcut for switching back to the netbook-launcher: I'd always have to click the Ubuntu logo in the top-left corner of the desktop. Buried in the Keyboard Shortcuts Preferences, I finally found Ctrl+Alt+Tab, which shows a popup, and Ctrl+Alt+Escape, which switches immediately.

Other random notes:

• I had to rediscover ntfs-config to automount my NTFS drives.
• Useful apps like Skype can be installed from the Medibuntu repository.
• It's necessary to run dropbox start -i before Dropbox will download the real daemon and actually start running.

I have a Linux machine at work that runs Kubuntu. I kicked off the upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty yesterday before I left. I'll find out on Monday how well that worked.

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

• Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
• Fragmentation happens too easily.
• Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
• Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
• ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

I've been very happy with my MacBook Pro. It's my primary home machine, sitting on the living room coffee table, and getting far more use than the desktop system in my office upstairs.

But it rarely leaves the house. It's big–a 17" screen–and it's heavy. I seldom carry it anywhere and I hardly ever bring it to a coffee shop.

I bought myself a netbook last month, an Asus Eee 1000H: 10" screen, 1024x600, 1.6GHz dual core Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, 3lbs, $479. Look at how much bigger the MacBook is in the photo! For reference, the Eee 1000H is the same size as a magazine. It's small enough and light enough that I take it with me every day, and it's been inside many a coffee shop.

The Eee came with Windows XP Home. I immediately repartitioned it and put Ubuntu Eee on the second partition. I don't think I've booted back into Windows after the first few days. All the devices (webcam, sound) and apps (Skype, Flash) work and I have all the Ubuntu goodness, optimized for this form factor, instead of a seven-year-old operating system.

The keyboard is adequate for my slender hands, though I would not care to do a lot of writing on it. The main problem that I continue to have with it is the placement of the right-hand Shift key, to the right of the Up-arrow key. My touch-typing fingers expect to find Shift beside the /, dammit.

The Elantech trackpad drove me nuts initially. Under both XP and Ubuntu Eee, it's configured with all kinds of multitouch gestures. Far too often, I inadvertently clicked or selected merely by hovering over the trackpad while typing. With some pain (especially on Ubuntu), I figured out how to turn all that crap off, so that it merely moves the mouse around and the right edge scrolls.

The screen is a little too small at 1024x600. The Netbook Remix interface replaces the GNOME desktop with a custom launcher. Each window runs maximized by default with minimal trimmings.

For a low-power machine, it's surprisingly fast. The Atom has two cores, so even if one is maxed out, the other one keeps the machine responsive. 1GB has been sufficient so far, but I'll probably get a 2GB stick because RAM is cheap.

I'm very pleased with the Eee. It nicely complements my MacBook.

Tomas Restrepo wrote a post about sharing dotfiles between Windows and Ubuntu, specifically about sharing .vimrc (Linux) and _vimrc (Windows) and the .vim (Linux) and vimfiles (Windows) directories.

I have a different solution. On Windows, my C:\AutoExec.bat includes:

set HOME=C:\gvr
set VIM=C:\Vim
set VIMDIR=%VIM%\vim71
set EDITOR=%VIMDIR%\gvim.exe
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Win32app;C:\GnuWin32\bin;C:\UnxUtils;C:\SysInternals;C:\Python25\Scripts

%HOME% (C:\gvr) contains _vimrc, vimfiles, and other stuff accumulated over many years. This directory is stored in a personal Subversion repository at DevjaVu. All my Vim files are stored with Unix LF endings, not Windows CR-LFs, so that they'll work on my Mac OS X and Linux boxen. I play some games with if has("win32") and if has('gui_macvim') to ensure that my _vimrc works cross-platform.

On my *nix boxes, the gvr folder lives under my home directory at ~/gvr, and ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim are symlinks:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/_vimrc ~/.vimrc
$ ln -s ~/gvr/vimfiles/ ~/.vim

In addition, the dotfiles that I keep in SVN are stored locally in ~/gvr/dotfiles without a leading period in their names, which makes them easy to see:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/dotfiles/bashrc ~/.bashrc

This arrangement works well for me.

My laptop scared the crap out of me last night. I came home to find it in a completely unresponsive state: it would not wake up. The hard disk LED was a solid green. I power cycled it and it refused to boot.

It did, however, boot from a Kubuntu Edgy CD, but it did not recognize the hard disk. In desperation, I booted into the BIOS and played with the disk-related menus. That fixed the problem, but I don't know what went wrong, and my faith is shaken in the reliability of this system.

I bought the laptop just over three years ago, shortly before I quit Microsoft, as a replacement for the work laptop that I had been using. It's served me well. I have a reasonably beefy desktop system of the same age, but I almost always use the laptop instead. It's a Compaq Presario X1012QV, with a 1.3GHz Centrino, a WXGA screen, 35GB hard disk, and 1280MB RAM. It had 512MB RAM originally, but I replaced one of the 256MB sticks with a 1GB stick last year, making it more pleasant to use.

For several months now, I've been planning to buy a new Vista-ready laptop this spring, with a Core 2 Duo, ~100GB disk, and 2+GB RAM. I want a 64-bit CPU so that I can occasionally run Win64; e.g., to update the Win64 port of Vim. I'm severely tempted by Apple and expect to end up with some kind of Mac laptop — my first ever Mac. I was hoping to hold out until Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes out sometime this spring, but the latest rumors say that it's "edging the very limit of the definition of 'Spring' — i.e. mid-June". If the Presario craps out on me again, I'll replace it in short order.

Whether I go with Mac or stick with a PC, I'll continue to run multiple OSes. Kubuntu Linux has been my primary operating system since last June, and I think it's unlikely that Vista will replace it. OSX may well do so.

I've dualbooted my laptop between Linux and Windows since June, spending nearly all of my time in Linux. I started out with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), but soon switched to Kubuntu (the KDE variant), later upgrading to Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

To make this useful, certain key applications have to be available in both Windows and Linux. Firefox for browsing; Thunderbird for email; Rainlendar for calendar; KeePass and KeePassX for password management; among others.

My laptop has four partitions:

• Primary 1, NTFS - Windows, aka /windows or /dev/hda1. 8GB

• Primary 2, Ext3 - Linux system partition, aka / or /dev/hda2. 12GB

• Extended 1. Linux swap partition. 2GB.

• Extended 2, Ext3. Shared partition, aka /shared. 15GB.

I'm using NTFS-3G under Kubuntu to read and write the NTFS partition. Linux has long had support for reading NTFS partitions, but only recently has good support for writing NTFS partitions been added. It's a user-mode only filesystem, so it's not possible to run Linux from an NTFS partition.

I've installed Ext2 IFS (Installable File System) on Windows, which allows me to read and write Ext3 (and Ext2) partitions. I keep cross-platform data, such as my Thunderbird mail folders, on the Ext3 partition, /shared. My home directory is also on the /shared partition, so there's very little data that I mind losing on the / partition. I haven't had any problems with Ext2 IFS, except that I've had no luck with external USB hard drives formatted as Ext3. I'm not about to convert my Windows partition to Ext3, however.

Rainlendar is a fairly recent addition to the above list of cross-platform apps. I was using Mozilla Sunbird, but I never liked it very much. It's very much the poor cousin of Firefox and Thunderbird. Sunbird is slow, clunky, and ugly, with very few developers, who have taken years just to get it to version 0.3. It supports iCal as an export format, but publishing calendars to the web is a bear.

I discovered Rainlendar a couple of months ago. It's far slicker, with a large set of skins, and more functionality. iCal is the native format. Rainlendar is based on wxWidgets, so it's cross-platform. Installation on Linux consists of extracting everything from a compressed tar file. There's no deb or rpm packages to install it into your system menu, alas. I've been running it by using Alt+F2 (Run Command) to launch /shared/georger/rainlendar2/rainlendar (yuck!)

Earlier today, I ran across the very useful ArsGeek site, which has an enormous set of useful tips for Ubuntu users. One post on installing Songbird inspired me to figure out how to add Rainlendar to the KDE Menu.

First, open up a terminal, then:

 cd /opt
 sudo mkdir rainlendar2
 sudo chown georger:georger rainlendar2
 tar jxvf /shared/Downloads/Rainlendar-Lite-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Substituting your username twice in the chown line.

You should now be able to run Rainlendar from the command line:

 ./rainlendar2/rainlendar2 &

At this point, you may want to install a different skin, as the default look is overwhelming in my opinion. I use the Vista skin. The older skins (.zip files) need to be unzipped into rainlendar2/skins; newer skins (.r2skin files) merely need to be copied into that directory.

Now to get the Rainlendar icon into /usr/share/pixmaps. (Finding the damn icon was the trickiest part of this whole exercise.):

 cd rainlendar2/resources
 unzip -j resources.zrc res/logo-large.png
 sudo mv logo-large.png /usr/share/pixmaps/rainlendar.png

Finally, let's add Rainlendar to the Office menu. ArsGeek gives the instructions for using Alacarte under Gnome. For KDE, click the K Menu button, right-click on Office, and choose Edit Menu, which brings up the KDE Menu Editor. Click New Item, then set:

• Name: Rainlendar

• Description: Calendar

• Comment: Manage calendar and todos

• Command: '/opt/rainlendar2/rainlendar2'

Click the blank icon button, then Other icons. Choose the rainlendar icon and click OK. Save the new menu entry.

You should now be able to launch Rainlendar from the Office menu. Enjoy!

Windows deservedly gets a lot of bad press about the unending stream of security updates. But Linux, despite all of the propaganda about it being more secure than Windows, has its own security problems.

Take this post from LWN.net yesterday:

No security updates today
[Posted October 25, 2006 by corbet]

It is sad that this is worthy of note, but it is: on this day, Wednesday, October 25, we have not received a single security update for any Linux distribution.

(This post was composed on a laptop running Kubuntu 6.06.)