Earlier this year I finally gained some (real) geek cred when I became a dual-boot geek, meaning I had become a (novice) proficient user of two OS's. Not double-counting Windows Vista and Windows XP (I can't stand it when people do that), I added OS X to my litany. This week, I added Linux.

Specifically the Guilty Gibbon release of UBUNTU. And it's cool.

I do not know how to do much yet. I can surf, using Mozilla. I've connected to my wireless network. I can now play DVDs (not a plug and play task to accomplish). Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I am doing this all on my Gateway Tablet PC.

I am not sure if it is even politically correct to refer to it as a Tablet PC anymore, since that verbiage is directly tied to the resident installation of the Tablet PC OS.

If you are a regular reader, you will remember my travails through the summer over trying to come off the Gateway and shift to a UMPC, then being driven back to the Gateway, which required a reformat and restoration of the factory image. After restoring the default layout of the Table (a Gateway CX2618), I encountered problems with the digitizer pen, which I later determined was failing. I purchased a new pen, as well as a new power adapter (the old one had worn a spot in the cable insulation), with the intent of using the tablet for the the next year a my work laptop.

After all of that effort, my plans to rule the world with my own personal electronics were eventually thwarted by those do-gooders in the IT department, and I was forced, after some 18 months of living outside the box, onto a company laptop. So the Gateway, which I had just spent some small amount of cash and large amounts of personal sweat in resuscitating back to life, was relegated to multimedia duties and personal authoring, since I still very much enjoyed using the pen interface.

Then the second pen started to fail. And not in that "it just completely dies" sort of way. But in the even more infuriating "it will work sometimes and then stop, and then work again" kind of way; the kind that keeps giving you breaths of hope only to beat you about the head and shoulders with discouragement once you get going.

The Gateway was headed for a trip to the dumpster. But a recent reading about th Ubuntu live CD, and a friend who had experimented with it, gave me the courage to attempt another install of Linux. I had dabbled with trying to install my retail version of SUSE 10.0 on four previous occasions and had failed miserably. I figured it could not help to at least try the Live CD, and use it even if I could not get a full install done. I had small hopes for getting an install to run on a a laptop made by a manufacturer as notorious as Dell for using proprietary hardware.

And truth be told, it took me a while to get everything working. My first eye opener was that using the Live CD as the primary OS was a non-starter. Too slow, for one thing, but I was also restricted in how much I could monkey with hardware settings and accessing the hard drive for file changes and re-partitioning. Only taking a deep breath and attempting an install would give me the full power I wanted.

A full morning of attempted installs before work failed. Talking it over with some co-workers, the recommendation I received was to try the Feisty Fawn download. Returning home, exhausted from one night of no sleep already, I plunged in again with Fawn. Still no joy.

Finally, I started playing with the partitioning and install configuration options. Eventually I struck on altering where to install the boot file, and voila, Ubuntu Gateway.

I have had two awesome experiences so far. The first was installing Mplayer, since the packaged Totem does not seem to work. A quick Google showed that this a prevalent issue widely experienced by new Linux users. Mplayer is the fix, or rather the alternative. Installing an app in Linux is not just double-clicking on an executable and observing an automated process while sipping coffee. It requires opening the Terminal, analogous to accessing the Command Line in Windows. In a few minutes, I was typing terminal commands and it felt like....I as back. I mean, like I was that kid again typing commands in DOS to order the laptop to do things. I was happy.

OK, so, no, I do not want to be typing the Terminal every day just to install a DVD player app. But as a side-hobby, it's pretty cool.

My second experience was a timely need for me to use my powers for good, not for evil. A buddy of mine had a 4 year old laptop that would not boot into Windows...it kept throwing an lsass error every time it booted up. Within a few seconds of being hung in the desktop with the tutorial pop-up, the system would reboot. I could not even get into Safe Mode. Time to slick the machine and restore the factory image. But first, I had to recover the data on the hard drive.

The ze5470, the older HP Pavilion I was working on, has a floppy drive, but I was not about to try and figure out ho to make a Windows Boot floppy...like I had any floppy drives in the apartment anyway. So I shifted to Bart PE.

OK...I was able to use some of the assessment tools, but I could not get the laptop to recognize my 100GB Portable USB hard drive, and I was not ready to move the laptop into my already cluttered computer room to try and work in there. Ubuntu.

Gutsy Gibbon booted, but I could not see anything in Gnome...the video was all blurry and fuzzy...I could make out the pointer and icons, but it was too risky to try and muck around with hard drive partitions while guessing whether or not I was t the right place in a drop down menu. Feisty Fawn.

Booted; worked. Now another lesson, or a re-learning...I could see the hard drive and the files in the NTFS partition, but I could not reformat the drive in order to then install a new Windows partition and boot scheme. Further, again, I could not see my portable hard drive. I was going to have to move the laptop.

Once in the computer room, I was able to hook up the Seagate external hard drive that I usually use with my Mac Book. Using the Feisty Live CD, I was able to back up all of the files to the Seagate hard drive. I had safely moved to the point where I could slick the drive, reformat, and install the factory image. So Linux had saved me, despite using other tools I had in my bag. And I did not have to remove the hard drive to hook up an IDE-to-USB adapter. I really did not want to hook the hard drive up to one of my own PCs anyway, until I'd had a chance to virus scan the contents.

So in the week since I started using Ubuntu, it has already come to my aid in restoring a PC, and I have had a childhood passion rekindled. I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.