I have a few days under my belt running Ubuntu and overall everything seems to be working great. I was able to get my wireless working - my router just needed to be restarted. I opted to install Thunderbird for my e-mail. At first, I was worried about keeping e-mail on my phone in sync with Thunderbird. However, once I quit trying to use POP and switched to IMAP things were much better. I was also very pleased to see that I can still sync my phone with my XP virtual machine via USB.

I think there are only a few things I still have to work out. Although, I think / hope I am making some progress, I still have not had any success connecting to the internet through my aircard or cell phone. Also, I have not found an open source alternative to MS Access. So I still have to occasionally boot up the virtual machine. Luckily, that is not very frequent and I can easily live with it.

There are many things I like thus far. I am really growing to like the multiple virtual desktops. I am also pleased that so far the transition has been fairly painless. I have found the ubuntu forums to be a great reource. The wi-fi light does not work the same as in Windows. Luckily, ‘iwconfig’ tells me if the radio is on or off. While less convenient, it still does what I need. In general I would setting up wi-fi is not yet up to par with Windows. There are still some quirks to work out (sometimes the machine will not properly reboot or shutoff), but overall I am very pleased with my progress.