I’ve considered trying to set up some kind of virtualization scheme to run Windows but have held off because of the combination of lack of time to experiment and the hope that I’d finally get the last couple of pieces moved. But I’ll keep your suggestion in mind if I decide to go that route.

VirtualBox would probably be the easiest to setup through its wizards and GUI (and a GPL version is available), but personally I’d be tempted to try out a kvm-backed copy of qemu, since that’s the new cool way to do this sort of thing; also, kvm might be fairly new, but stuff that is part of the mainline kernel does tend to advance rather quickly, especially when it has as much public and corporate interest as virtualization, so even compared to 5-year old products from commercial companies like VMWare, I’d say kvm is a pretty good bet in the long run. I don’t know how available the parts are yet in Ubuntu, though (you’d need a kernel module and a special version of qemu, I think).

Anyway, I’m writing this as I install Ubuntu on my freshly-wiped laptop (a 1.5-year-old Compaq), after I realized that the ubuntu partition was actually able to control enough of the hardware in the laptop, even the weird TI card reader, and that what windows really did was run Firefox, Visual Studio, and a putty terminal to a coLinux “Virtual Machine,” which I was always wishing was my main shell anyway. There are a few other incidental programs I use as well, but like Firefox they’re all open-source and cross-platform so I can keep using the exact same software. I suspect I’m going to miss Visual Studio since nothing else I’ve tried is quite so nice at editing C++ (and the laptop’s CPU is an AMD Sempron 2800, so no running Visual Studio through kvm for me), but being able to use vim and switch back and forth to a real command line will probably be enough to make me forget all about Visual Studio, and if it isn’t and I really miss having autocomplete, Eclipse’s CDT is quite nice. I might also miss the way the mute button lights up when the volume is muted, but that’s a pretty minor thing; also, it worked on Ubuntu 6.04, so it should be possible to figure out how to get it working again if it really bugs me.

Of course, not wanting to make my first full-time (albeit on one of my computers only, so I guess it really only works out to being a 1/3rd) switch to desktop Linux too easy, I’m attempting to install ubuntu to a LUKS-encrypted root, but since asking for your passphrase and mounting a LUKS partition is apparently handled practically automatically by Ubuntu’s initramfs, I’m also going to try to get it to instead use keys off of a USB Flash Drive. And I’m using Gutsy Tribe 3, because it can’t be that unstable, can it, and even if it is, I only need to suffer with the instability for 2-3 months until final release, right?

So after finding your site while searching for information on how you go about encrypting filesystems on Linux (I’ve decided to use LUKS, but EncFS looks useful for directories I want to be able to backup to an untrusted server or synchronize between different machines), I’m now reading your other entries while waiting for it to install, and am mainly filling up your comment box to waste time. Sorry :)

Ah, looks like it’s done copying files and now I need to figure out how to make sure the filesystem will actually get mounted once I reboot. To anybody else doing the same thing, FeistyEncryptedRootWithInstaller on the ubuntu help pages is pretty useful, and unlike other howtos on the Ubuntu site, realizes you don’t need to install a temporary copy of the OS when you’ve already got a LiveCD copy running (which is to say: apt-get works when running off the LiveCD — you don’t need to install a copy of the OS just because the LiveCD is missing a program you need).