I was faced with a tricky problem. In a little over a week, I’m going to Brazil (mostly staying in a place a very long way from the nearest city or town) for three weeks. I think that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll have any way of connecting my own computer to the internet for most of that time (though I may find the odd cybercafe somewhere), but I still wanted to have a computer with me. I need to take notes, analyse results, read papers and so on, all of which would be much easier with a laptop than without.

But here’s where the problem comes in; I really didn’t want to risk taking my PowerBook. I’m likely to be working in fairly rough conditions, and I’m spending a few days at either end of the trip in Sao Paulo, where there is—let’s face it—at least some possibility of the computer being stolen. It’s insured, but I can’t face the disruption of hassle of having to get a new one, recreate my system from backups and so on. And I have to admit that I feel terribly attached to my Mac—I just didn’t feel that I could put my baby my computer in the line of fire like that.

Then Mr. Bsag had a brainwave; why not set up my ancient and otherwise unused PC laptop (aka ‘Ugly Laptop’) and take that out? It’s also insured, and I wouldn’t be too heartbroken or inconvenienced if it got broken or stolen, nor would I spend my time fretting about it getting scratched. The boy’s a genius.

So I’ve been spending some time getting it all set up. I had been playing with Slax on it, but I wanted to do a proper installation of Linux before travelling. I mentioned before that I’d tried Ubuntu but found video problems during the installation. When the latest version of Ubuntu came out, I tried that and got the same behaviour again. In a moment of inspiration, I tried hitting they keyboard combination to switch between the output for an external monitor and the LCD, and after a cycle, found that the image miraculously refreshed itself properly. So Ubuntu ’Hoary Hedgehog’ seemed like a good choice for a permanent installation.

This time, everything went perfectly. I think that Ubuntu must—along with Slax—be one of the least painful installations I’ve ever done. I went with the defaults the whole way, and the only choices I had to make during installation were my language, time zone and preferred screen resolution—all very easy. It set up my network connection automatically, and I’ve found that it even hibernates properly, which is something I always used to have trouble with under RedHat. And that was more or less that. It already came with a lot of the software I needed (vim, Firefox, terminals galore and Open Office for those times when you’ve got to read MS Office files), and installing other stuff is very easy with the Debian apt-get command.

The real joy of running a Unix-based system (any Unix-based system) is that a lot of the tools are interchangeable, particularly if you use portable files like plain text, HTML or PDF. I plan to get everything back on to my Mac via my USB key or over the network when I get back.

One of the tasks when setting up a new machine is to choose a hostname. I’ve had a penguin theme for my machines for a while (Rockhopper, Macaroni and so on), so I chose Emperor. He’s got a long way to travel, and there’s a chance that he might not come back—it seemed appropriate, somehow.