Broke the installation already
When I yesterday said that I don’t give Linux the 99.999% expectation to work I was not kidding. Just this morning I decided to use synergy and because I don’t want to run the command everytime I decided to add to the startup scripts, after some looking around I finally found how to do it and it was easy to understand, so I decided to give it a go. Once all the configurations were done I decided to reboot.
And then I noticed that something must have gone wrong somewhere. I simply get the console login instead of the graphical interface which I was expecting. Controlling Ubuntu from my laptop was of course also no longer possible (it was before, I have tested it). 
So what went wrong?
Well, first of all I have been messing around with files I thought to understand (as a matter of fact I do understand them) however had I not done that the system would still have worked. Although the rule here is “If you don’t use it, it won’t break” is being applied, it is something a rule that remains true. In this case I did touch it and it did break.
Anyway I did a few more things I didn’t like so now I’m installing another Linux distribution just to see if I prefer this one.
Within a month I will get a netbook (a small laptop, that is actually too small to use) and then I intend to put some of my work on my current laptop on that. With a bit of luck I might actually set the laptops up in such a way that synergy uses thee laptops (oh and I get one monitor which I can use to increase the amount of screens to four).
Installing Ubuntu on my old laptop
After cleaning up my room. I found one of my old laptops (which have been passed to my mother and back again) and wondered what I should do with it. It was my first laptop and although I don't intend to use it, I don't want to throw away a good laptop (well, there is a line of pixels who always have red on but that is besides the point).
Before I decided to install Ubuntu I wanted to take one last look at what my old laptop had stored on the computer. A wise thing since I came across a few old applications and some documents that all had some kind of emotional value. But more important I found my old music collection. 
Copying my music collection from one computer to another wouldn't be such a big problem except that the library was/is around 10 GB. To give you an idea my current library is 27 GB which means I can let the music being played for almost 12 days before I encounter the first song in the playlist again. Anyway, copying from one system could be done in a few ways. One would be using an USB stick (which means I would to do it many times before everything would have been copied). The second method would be using the windows file shares to copy things over the network. Besides the fact that both devices are on wireless, the way windows copies a lot of files is not really fast.
In the end I decided to try something new: Bittorrent. Ok, I admit I have used bittorrent before but never to copy files from one device to another. Simply create a decentralized torrent, copy that to the receiving computer and run it. Besides that it worked (I tried it once before) it was rather fast. Of course once I decided to give the seeder a wire it was a whole lot faster (2.5 Mb per second instead of 500 Mb per second)
Once I copied a few of the other files using dropbox I decided to install Ubuntu. First downloading the live cd and put it on an usb using UNetbootin. The live version worked nice, so all that is left is installing.
The reason I decided for Ubuntu is because Windows XP is rather old and I have missed around with it a bit too much (somethings have been broken) and since I don't want to pay money for something I'm rarely going to use I decided to put ubuntu on it.
Although the live version run perfectly, once I tried the installed version I got a flickering screen and couldn't do anything anymore. Thank god, I'm not a complete Linux noob so after half an hour I finally fixed usplash problem (reinstall the graphics driver did the trick), but it at least demonstrates one the reason why I prefer Windows over ubuntu. When I install Windows I expect it to work 99.999% of the time. Linux on the other hand doesn't get that amount of trust from me.
Long story short. Ubuntu has been installed and I'm thinking of using it as my backup and for word processing. My good laptop is slowly becoming an software development only laptop and the occasional game laptop. However on both occasion I see it as work and there are times I simply one play around. And for that reason I use my old laptop.