Due to a recent accounting error (on my part and in my favour) I recently found myself in possession of a netbook. I know that makes me a luddite and I should have bought a tablet. Call me a throwback. In my defence it was half the price of an iPad and a lot more practical for me. The major deal breaker for me is that iPad's don't come with a command line client and can't (to the best of my knowledge) run the only editor worth having. Also, iPad's don't run free software and that is becoming more important to me. So I bought a netbook.

As it came with Windows installed my first task was to install a decent operating system. I'm a fan of Xubuntu so I grabbed the latest release and then ... stopped. Because my first thought was to burn the Xubuntu .iso file to a disk and install from that, but my netbook doesn't have a CD drive. I've never installed from anything else in the past so I was a bit stuck.

The good news is that it is 2011 and Google came to the rescue. After a couple of false turns, and via Pendrivelinux.com, I found the rather wonderful LinuxLive USB Creator. Whilst it isn't an exhaustive test, and don't come to me with your problems, I simply installed and started LiLi, pointed it at my USB stick and the .iso file I had downloaded and 10 minutes later I had a bootable copy of Xubuntu.

Some words of praise, too, for the (X)ubuntu installer folks who have made getting their operating system on a new machine a complete breeze. Thanks everyone, top job.

Now all I've got to do is install all of the software that I rely on, configure the thing and I can start using it. At my pace that should only take a week or two. I'll be back then.