Start-up was easy like before and the first thing I noticed was a different desktop. It’s still brown but slightly plain. Speaking of desktops, I finally figured out that it’s possible to change the background image. I didn’t actually try it out. I’m keeping that for when I finally install Ubuntu.

Apart from the desktop, I played around with OpenOffice. I’m not a big MSOffice user. As long as it gets the job done, I’m open to pretty much any software. The next stop on the software list was the FastStone Image viewer. I wasn’t all that impressed and I’m planning to use XnView once I make the switch. Ditto SMPlayer for my video needs.

As a final plunge, I opened up the terminal and tried out some commands. Nothing too fancy, just some sudo commands and lshw to display a list of hardware on the machine. This is something pretty new for me but I’m sure with practice some of these commands will become second nature to me.

Did I have any problems this time? Yes, one in particular. When I use the touchpad, it suddenly selects an app as I’m scrolling. This happened to me even with the Intrepid CD so it’s not a Jaunty thing. I’ve bought an optical mouse to use so I don’t have to rely on the touchpad but it is a little inconvenient.

I read through a bunch of tutorials as well and a lot of them talk about setting a separate /home partition during installation. Assuming I have about 25 GB of space after I set my Windows and swap partitions, how should I divide the remaining two partitions? Another thing I read was that the Master IDE hard disk is referred to as hda. But my partition manager only showed the sda drive. Did I miss something out? Or should I just go ahead and install the two OS’s using the side-by-side option and be done with it?

Another dilemma is whether to go with Jaunty or Intrepid? Jaunty seems to have a lot of improvements but is it worth installing so soon or should I hold off on it? Have you installed Jaunty and how are things running for you? Let me know in the comments.