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The threat of snow causes quite a bit of panic and chaos in these parts, but that’s what we had last night. And low and behold, right after they sent us home early the snow started coming down. It was a light one, but it last all night, and now we have about 4 inches on the ground. And not that powdery stuff you can’t do anything with. This is the thick heavy snow. The kind that you can build a manly snowman with. Or pack a deadly snowball that could send someone head first into the ground.

Now the funny thing is, even though the ground is covered, this still will only for a couple of hours. It’s already melting and you can hear it runoff coming off the houses. That’s what’s great about these little blizzards; you get this great snowfall that covers everything, but in a few hours it’s all gone and life goes back to normal.

Want to see some more pictures? Check out the gallery.

Not to just be content with having Ubuntu on an older machine I went ahead and installed Virtualbox so I could run Ubuntu side by side with Windows. Again, the install took about 20 minutes and it was up and running. It had no problem installing in the virtual environment and came up with video and network drivers. I was on the web, checking email and looking at sites without having to configure a thing.

This also proves to me that I need to ditch Virtual PC for Windows 7 for Virtualbox. VPC for Win 7 is junk and is just too much of a hassle. Virtualbox was so much easier to configure and actually works like the old VPC used to.

Going back to Ubuntu, there is no denying that installing apps in Windows is a far easier task than installing apps for Unix. There’s still tons of command line scripting going on in the Unix world and that alone is going to be an interesting learning curve. I had no problem getting system updates, but getting something like Thunderbird 3 on there was not just a simple double-click. And even when I did get Thunderbird working and downloading my email, the app is sitting on my desktop not in a “Program Files” type of location, so clearly not ideal.

Windows is usually really good for its ease of use, but as far as getting an OS installed which has a browser, word processing, image editing and network functionality, Ubuntu has proven itself to be just as easy and effective. It does come down to the apps, but if MS keeps pushing cloud computing the OS will lose its relevance since everything will be running out there.

While they aren’t the same, I really like what I see so far.

Wow, that worked out nicely! In about 20 minutes I got Ubuntu fully installed with video and network support. It also has OpenOffice, IM and Email clients, a BitTorrent client, and system utilities which look very similar to the ones you get with Windows, and full support for USB. Ok, so far I’m impressed with the Karmic Koala. Sure, I haven’t done much with it yet, the install is half the battle, right?

I started the install at 1:52pm and I was looking at my desktop at 2:19pm. This also includes the time it took to completely format the 640GB drive since it had Windows 7 64bit on it. I figure that took at least a few minutes so the actual install took about 20 minutes. As an aside, it did recognize that I had Windows 7 still on the drive and gave me the option to dual boot. I doubt Windows 7 would have been so kind.

I even got it to play AVI, WMV and MP3 files right off the bat. It’s a simple download to get the codecs. I was actually a little surprised by that.

I forgot that I could use Virtualbox to install a virtual copy of Windows or use WINE to try and run some apps for those times when I would need them. Looks like Virtualbox is the more likely choice since WINE doesn’t support Paint Shop Pro, or Live Writer. I doubt OneNote would work either, but a virtual machine isn’t the end of the world. I’m not quite ready to make the switch, but if this test bed works out Windows may be off this machine sooner rather than later.