Try this out

Via Parent Hacks: Tux Paint is a free, open source drawing program for children. Runs on just about anything you're likely to have around the house. Maybe even your Newton!

References

Here are some of the sources I'm reading BEFORE I start messing around with repartitioning my hard drive:

• LinuxDevCenter.com -- Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop (an oldie but a goodie)


• Illustrated Dual Boot Site (this one is actually currently being updated for the just-released version of Ubuntu! Wow!)


• Dual Booting Ubuntu Linux and Windows on a Toshiba Laptop (very detailed)

Ooh... fun weekend reading! :-)

We need backup!

After a couple months' delay for moving, I've finally gotten around to step one in my Open Source Home project: backing up the hard drive where all my important stuff (e.g., baby pictures, games, and ebooks) reside in preparation for installing Ubuntu. [Actually, I backed up the entire laptop to another machine before moving, just in case, but I've added some things since then.]

Backing up really isn't difficult at all. I'm using Windows XP, which comes with a very simple backup utility. Or at least, it's supposed to. For some reason, XP Home didn't come with the backup utility installed, but it was on the original disks. Windows XP Backup Made Easy">This document from Microsoft gives detailed instructions on how to retrieve it from those disks, and at that point everything should be fine and dandy.

Unless...

Your version of XP, like mine, came from a group distribution, where a licensed retailer (in my case, the computer store at the university where I worked at the time) makes their own copies of the disks and distributes them with the machines they configure. For whatever reason, the retailers themselves were sold disks that didn't have ntbackup.exe in the /valueadd directory, where the Microsoft documentation says it should be, so the "restore" disks they sold their customers didn't have it either. And so I searched and searched, but ntbackup.exe was nowhere to be found on my disks.

Fortunately, that's exactly the kind of thing I use Google Groups for. If you're not familiar with Google Groups, it's a great resource for any kind of weird problem you might have and can't find in a standard search engine query, because it archives Usenet posts, as well as its own user-created groups. This time, I discovered the reason my disks didn't have the backup utility on them: a lot of educational users (and people who bought some brands of PCs with XP Home preinstalled) were reporting the same thing.

More importantly, I discovered that a lot of people were getting a copy of ntbackup.exe from this page. Between my Google web search and my Google Groups search, I found an awful lot of legitimate-sounding people who recommended this site, so I decided to give it a try. I can't tell you with absolute certainty that you won't get a virus or blow up your computer if you download the file from this site, but I will tell you that nothing like that happened to me and I've been using the file I downloaded for a very long time.

Backing up with the Backup utility is VERY straightforward. From the Start menu, you can choose All Programs-->Accessories-->System Tools-->Backup and then use the wizard to back up either your entire computer or just the files, directories, or drives you choose. You can back up to another place on the network, a different drive, or external media such as a CD or flash drive.

So now I've backed up what I wanted to back up and I'm ready to take the plunge. Next time: using the System Restore disk to (gulp!) repartition my hard drive.

Phone home

Via Lifehacker: a Wired feature on open source phones. There's only one that looks to me like it would be viable right now for the average home consumer, but they're fun to look at.

Some vacation!

Well, I intended to be back a little earlier than this, but moving is HARD! We left a day late, then the moving van was actually lost for several days, and now we're unpacking. But things are coming together, so it won't be long now before I discover just where I packed the laptop I've earmarked for this project and the System Restore and Ubuntu CDs I feverishly burned in the last few days before our move, planning to, oh, I don't know, sit in a hotel room somewhere in Ohio and reformat my hard drive.

This foolishness has inspired me to start coming up with some rules for the Open Source Home project, and here's the first one:

OPEN SOURCE HOME RULE #1:

Don't try to do too much too soon.
It's tempting to rush right in and start erasing data and installing software, but I need to keep in mind that my laptop is rather unstable and it won't take much to push it over the edge. Before I do anything at all I need to back up the hard drive (even the stuff I think I don't need) and really prepare the machine for what I'm going to do to it. So tomorrow next time I'll go over backing up the hard drive, even if your particular version of Windows (like mine) didn't happen to come with a Very Important Backup Application that's SUPPOSED to be standard in Windows, but isn't, necessarily.