Contrary to my usual software updates posts where I post about updates to the blog software or to TheScian.com, this one is about the updates to the computers I use everyday. I use a PowerBook at home and a Dell Latitude with Windows XP at work. Due to a momentary lack of judgement on my part I upgraded the Adobe Acrobat Reader in the work machine to the latest version. Well, that did it. All hell broke lose. Everytime I reboot the machine, Acrobat would take over and download all of Adobe's products and would insist that I reboot once again. If I did reboot, the process would repeat again. This is insane. So, today I am here to report that I have trashed Acrobat reader in favor of GhostScript. Next time I have a purchasing need, I am going to vote with my wallet. Screw Adobe Acrobat.
In other news, I bought a cheap secondhand celeron desktop recently for various reasons. One of the reasons in that I am a cheap kind of person and the other is the possibility of running Ubuntu, which I am have been doing since last weekend. Ubuntu is wonderful. While I had to screw around Windows (I also bought Windows XP Home OEM Edition for this box) to recognise the sound card and the network card in that box, Ubuntu breezed through and configured them without a glitch. Nifty. There's much more to Ubuntu that I am exploring and experimenting (installing FreeNX, the excellent remoting app, for instance.). The Dapper Drake distro I have is a thoughtful and comprehensive release. If you want to rock solid OS for home needs, get Ubuntu. It's free and fantastic and they'll even ship it free to you.