This is the second free Open Source/Free Software related magazine that I've run into recently. Free Software Magazine looks like its available free and its articles are not aimed squarely at the technical geek crowd. A sample from issue #10:

1. Jump to Debian GNU/Linux: A guide to why the Debian distro is a good choice
2. A techno-revolutionary trip on the internet: Reflections on the lessons from Dean for America

Luckily the install is very painless and mostly automated (easier than the last windows install I did). Despite all the critiques of linux installs (and yes, it did cross my mind that a new Mac would be nice), I find myself hunting for drivers and driver CDs (especially for motherboard subsystems) than I have to compared to Windows.

That said, I have to do the following to get the PC back into a useful state - install nvidia binary drivers, setup twinview for the dual monitors, setup apache2 virtual hosts for my local development sites, install mysqll4.1, install php5, install subversion. The most painful one will be recompiling the kernel to include mppe support so I can vpn into the network at Forum One and be productive on Wednesday.

Not sure what it says about me, or my comfort with linux nowadays compared to 3 years ago, but none of the above sound all that challenging. I think its mostly because apt is such a handy packaging system, debian developers do a good job maintaing packages, so that something like subversion is just an apt-get install subversion away.

Update: at 3am, I started installing at 11:30pm, I had a working system with all of the above. MMPE support is now in them main linux kernel tree so no more patching and kernel recompiles for me!

Thanks to my boss [David Witzel]{hrefhttp:="" www.forumone.com="" section="" about="" f1people="" witzel"=""} for pointing out that my comments system was broken when he tried to post in the post about soccer being the most exciting sport.

Turns out, when I tweaked the system on tuesday and hid the subject field (instead of removing) I didn't test. The processor was expecting the subject field to be passed, and since it was required, the action would fail and you'd get a cryptic "Errors encountered" without the helpful "Subject required" message near the now non-existant field.

All is well again.