Today, I finally received the laptop that I am supposed to use at work. It is an older laptop but its specs are still fairly decent. It comes with a T2500 Core Duo processor at 1.8GHz with 2Gb of RAM. However, it has a puny little screen and I hope that I’ll be able to find a larger screen to hook it up to.
Unfortunately, it came with Windows XP. I was told that it would be configured in a dual-boot set up. However, it turns out that I will need to install Linux myself. Tomorrow, I intend to burn a Kubuntu 8.10 iso and install it onto the laptop. Then, for compatibility purposes, I will run the windows OS under a virtual machine. I will probably need to do this until I can be sure that there are no specific proprietary things that require Windows. Even then, I will probably still keep the partition around.
I will probably need to go in early to office in order to do this. I hope that Kubuntu can be installed with minimal hassle in the shortest amount of time. Then, I can hopefully get the trainer to help me set up the Linux version of their tools. This will probably help me simplify a lot of the development work that I will have to be doing in the future.
There are many people who use Linux at the office. So, it should not be an issue in my case. However, there aren’t many who use a dual-boot setup. Some run Linux under a virtual machine and others use a remote login programme to run Linux on the servers. However, seeing that I have a working Windows version, I should be able to copy any settings over easily.
So, here’s to myself – and Linux. All the best!
Sybreon Ones Nought 
Belated congrats on the new job!
So can you actually run the existing WinXP install (that was “installed on the bare metal”) within a virtual machine? If so, I’d like to learn that trick 🙂
It is not as straight-forward as I had hoped. I booted up the partition and XP realised that it was on a different machine. Therefore, it asked for a product re-activation. Then, I had some trouble trying to re-activate it. So, I will have to look into this again in the future if it becomes necessary.