Messing with Vista and its lack of SATA drivers reminded me that I do in fact have room for four SATA drives in this rig. I didn't get one when I set it up because a) I had several spare IDEs and b) they seemed expensive at the time. However, prices seem to have dropped now, and I picked up a 250MiB drive for a mere £60.

But what to install..? I already had WinXP and Vista dual-booting, so how about Linux? I tried Fedora Core 5 because I had the DVD around from upgrading my existing Fedora box.

FC5 failed rather abjectly. Not only did it screw up the GRUB bootloader, but when I worked around that hard-locked as soon as it tried to run the firstboot post-installer. Seemingly, FC has issues with either my Radeon or my Audigy.

An opportunity for a different distro then... I grabbed an Ubuntu ISO off their site and got that rolling. There were no such problems with Ubuntu: GRUB installed perfectly, and I can still boot to WinXP and Vista. The default interface has a very clean look and, obviously, no crashes when booting.

Whilst poking around to see what else Ubuntu could do I came across the term “Xgl”. Xgl is one of two attempts (the other is AIGLX) to add some va-va-voom to the X-windows interface, and boy... did they succeed. Just have a look at this video showing what it can do. And if you want to try it out for yourself, you can use the Kororaa Live CD to test it out (for the uninitiated, Live CDs don't need to be installed - or even alter anything on your system).