My good old mac must have the world record for most drops off starbucks tables and random bumps. The few of you that have seen it must must agree that it looks as if it just survived a train wreck.

It has died on me about 5 times and somehow I always managed to repair re-build re-format and revive. But this time… oh lord.. this was simply too much. It simply died and denied even to boot or give me open firmware (i once had to learn open firmware in 10 hours to bring it back).

So here is where our story starts, giving up on my mac for good i had to turn to an antique acer travelmate manufactured maybe 10 years ago (Kindly Provided by Mista Moi Kirsh).

The problem was, it had a screwed up windows instalation. With its CDRom and floppy drives not working i had few options to make this laptop usable again.

But allas a single search on google enlighted me.

I came to Wubi a point and click ubuntu installer for windows.

Instalation was a breeze, no problems at all, as easy as installer any other well formed application and it also comes with an unistaller too.

Now im not going to lie it did took me all night long to download and install updates but this was mainly cuz i had 256 mb of ram. But after it finished everything was love and sugar.

I don’t expect to be able to make some renders, graphic design or genetic algorithm design. but it sure has brought me the web back.

Today im 100% webbased Gdocs, Gmail GReader at excellent speed (using xubuntu a lightweight ubuntu distro for old computers) and i have to admit im a google bitch now and I’m loving it. 100% free and opensource now.This will keep me going till i get my new mac and who knows maybe i will just stick to linux for a while.

So if you see yourself in the need to rescue some old hardware or simply want to try linux this is a risk free method to get you started

Thanks Ubuntu and Wubi,
oh yeah a google too