My work laptop had a BSOD today, which looks like it was caused by bit rot on the root partition. While everything’s backed up onto S3, restores from New Zealand of 20GiB of data take a while, so I was kinda hoping to recover smoothly without getting the IT guys to visit, who probably will just rebuild it. I’m pretty sure that’s fair payment for getting chocolate inside my laptop’s fan.

It was a good opportunity to give ubuntu maverick a spinup before it goes on the big iMac at home as dual-boot. The install is slowly tweaked each time, and it’s really clean. I am pretty sure my mum could do this without any help now, and the fresh look is nice - it’s truly a class act OS.

One workaround was needed to resolve what is probably a stuck trackpad on the loan laptop; with a rmmod psmouse then it was all go. Everything works which really is an impressive step forward for Canonical, with strong OEM relations clearly now paying off. Hats off guys!

Anyway long story short, nautilus and brasero to the rescue, and I now have a bunch of md5 checksummed DVDs stashed before the hired goons come tomorrow to blow it away. I love the ntfs integration in linux, and the new maverick Ubuntu gets thumbs up all round - especially as it’s now got CouchDB 1.0.1 included - yay!