One of the most interesting aspects of keeping up this blog over time, has been going back and reading about all of the cool stuff I’ve tried out over the past couple of years. For most of that time, I was “stuck” with having only one “good” PC at home, and I tended to keep it in a state of disrepair, so often I’d get myself into some pickles (such as a broken OS) . Things are a little bit different now. I now have a “real” test machine – it’s a Dell Precision M70 notebook. It has a single-core 2 GHz Pentium M, 2GB RAM, 256MB Nvidia Video pushing a nice 1920×1200 15.4” screen and a fairly speedy 7200RPM disk drive. I picked it up as a steal on eBay and I have a nice spot for it right here on my desk next to the monitor for my main home PC (also a Dell Precision – 690 to be exact) and although I’ve decided to keep Windows 7 (yeah, yeah, really!) as the only native OS on the 690 workstation, I can test my heart away on the M70. However, even that may wind down in time as my overall interests are changing somewhat.

Let me explain.

I have become more interested in the general “idea” of Open Source and what can be accomplished with the “open” way of thinking than I am with one particular technology. I’m seeing some very innovative and exciting software come out of open source, and I have a feeling that is more of what I’m going to be writing about in the future.

Here are some general ideas, feelings and predictions I have:

• Intel’s Moblin looks awesome (Based on Fedora), and will make great strides in the Netbook segment
• GNOME and specifically “GNOME Shell” will innovate the User Interface of all computing platforms.
• The sleeping giant known as Red Hat will wake up and give Ubuntu a run for the Linux desktop, and Ubuntu will have to start innovating on it’s own rather than riding a wave of popularity to keep up.
• Novell will continue to push the envelope in regards to interoperability with Microsoft technology, which to the dismay of many “die-hard” free-software fans will bring Open Source technologies to a wide new audience. In fact, Novell and all of what the openSUSE team is doing as well as the MONO team really excites me a lot right now – that’s just some cool stuff!

I’m also very interested in seeing what will develop from the Oracle purchase of Sun. I’m curious to see what will happen with OOo, MySQL VirtualBox and OpenSolaris.

I would especially hate to see VirtualBox die  -  I use it every day and I love it. I also think what has been accomplished with OpenSolaris is next to phenomenal. They took a (somewhat) obscure big-iron UNIX OS and made a nice comfy desktop OS that fits nicely onto an installable LiveCD (a’la Ubuntu). In fact I’ve tried each version of OpenSolaris that has been released and each version has gotten better and better, and the latest, 2009.06 release has gotten so polished and runs so well I think I could live with it as a day-to-day OS on a 2nd computer, such as that M70.

As for my day-to-day stuff, Windows 7 has just plain won me over. I was bored of XP (nothing new to learn and explore), Vista would drive me nuts at times, and I just fiddled around with Linux for a few years as a result. Hopefully it will not be another 8 years before Microsoft can come up with the next suitable OS replacement.

Also, besides all of that here lately I’ve been spending more time (gasp) away from the PC and regaining interest in other passions and hobbies. For example I’m purposely bringing music back into the forefront and simply spending more time sitting on my back patio playing guitar in the afternoon…little things like that.

Who knows – this time next year, this might read like a normal everyday blog, by a normal everyday guy

NAH! I’m way too much of a NERD for that! Who am I kidding!

PS, I’m still going to be involved in the GNOME Journal and we can always use more writers, editors and ideas for articles and people to interview, so stop by and help out if you are so inclined!