It has been an interesting 7 days for the computer “geeks” and early adopters. Windows 7 was released with much fanfare and hype over the built-in security. Canonical released the latest Ubuntu 9.10 on 29 October with a range of upgrades. Of course this has meant a couple of busy days as I copy all of the data off my laptop onto external USB drives and then totally wipe my laptop after deactivating various Windows based products. I installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit first and the initial install was fine and It was just time consuming to add all of the other software, I’m still not sure I haven’t missed something , with Windows installing 64-bit and 32-bit to the separate “Program Files” and “Program Files(x86)” respectively. A nice surprise was Photoshop CS4 resulting in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions being installed. Frustratingly this was the only Adobe CS4 product that was 64-bit. The little bit I’ve used it has been fine, so far so good.

This morning I found a nice new web site that makes it easy to install the various open source and free software options available on Windows XP/Vista/7. It works in the background and only installs verified software with all the junk toolbars and other crap disabled. Try the free Ninite as you upgrade to Windows 7 or just to get the software in XP or Vista.

Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 was a simple ISO download and burn to CD. The installation was the customary 7 steps, with the only hassle being that I like to create a “/home” partition to make backups easy. This involved manually resizing the Windows 7 main partition (Windows 7 creates 2 partitions as part of the install – a 100 MB “recovery” partition and the rest for Windows) and then manually creating the three partitions (/, swap and /home) before continuing the installation. A working system in 30 minutes! I then started copying my data across and installing the extra applications that I use all the time. The only hassle I found was with Synaptic’s “Quick search” not finding some extra packages but the full search did. Adding the extra repositories for Medibuntu and VirtualBox was simple so multimedia support and virtual machines were quickly enabled. KDE4 installed fairly easily and the new login screen with the option boxes on the bottom menu bar made it simple to change desktop environments.