My my.. things have changed

It’s been 2 months.. of course things have changed. I got a new car, visited some cool countries, seen a few concerts and am definitely broker after it’s all said and done. All of it good, no doubt. Of course I’ll give a longer update soon but the reason for this post (surprisingly) is Dell.

Last month I decided to pick up a Dell laptop. They had recently made the decision to start selling Ubuntu as an installed and supported OS. I figured the best way to show my support was to purchase one of the machines. Why not? I kind of wanted a second laptop to play with OS‘s, war driving, etc.. I LOVE my MacBook Pro, don’t get my wrong, but I wanted something else to work with so I could leave my Mac where I can use it more often.

That being said, today I was over at the Dell Ubuntu Wiki and noticed that they have some very cool tools available. One of which can check the system BIOS and then flash it via the command line. That’s pimp. Seriously.

So far the laptop has been great. I use it around the living room and the kitchen and I want to play with it as a media box so I can research options for replacing my ageing XMBC install (hopefully they will get XBMC for linux off the ground!). I used it just this week at work in order to do a wireless survey of the office (using BackTrack). Since then we’ve managed to get some of the work laptops working with Backtrack.. so that’s good.

I am also looking at possibly installing an external WiFi antenna connection, in order to attach a omni-directional mic so I can do some better scanning. It’s probably easier to do that then it is to try and find a WiFi ExpressCard that has an external antenna and can be used with Kismet.

The laptop has a decent battery life, it’s fast enough, the display is nice.. I’ll probably even install a few games and see how well they play. Why not. I’ve got an extra drive that that I use for testing OS‘s and so that’s pretty useful too.

I haven’t had to use support yet, and I don’t plan too but it’s nice knowing that if there are problems with the main hardware, with linux, a company will work on fixing it. Cool.