Ubuntu to you, too!

As you can imagine, it can get lonely out in a mail truck by yourself for three or more hours at a time. What is The Mailman's solution to all this deafening solitude? Podcasts, people, podcasts! Near the top of his list is The Tech Guy with Leo Laporte. The Mailman and Leo go way back, all the way to our old house where we used to have cable and he could watch him on TV. I find his show about tech and helping people troubleshoot their techy problems enjoyable and entertaining. But The Mailman is way into it; he gets all the podcasts that come with it. Things like, This Week in Tech, This Week in Google, The Daily Giz Whiz, it just goes on like that. It is from somewhere in this realm that he learned the word "ubuntu".
Now, he already knew some other foreign words like Linux and Mozilla. Technically speaking, ubuntu is an ancient African word which means humanity to others, but technoligically speaking, it is an open source Linux operating system for desktops and laptops. Upon hearing this new word, The Mailman thought of our old, rather slow but quite reliable Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop. Like The Mailman and this Leo character, the laptop and I go way back.
Not quite as far back, but at least back to the time that it decided it didn't want to work anymore, right around a time when we didn't have money in the budget to replace it, and I spent several afternoons coaxing it back into utility with updates, defrags, disk sweeps, and whatever else it took to breathe life back into it. Eventually, it was replaced as the family computer by a new desktop, and the laptop was relegated to schoolwork for the kids and occasionally being pressed into service as a dvd player. Everyone seemed happy with this arrangement. Happy, that is, until ubuntu came along.
"What are you looking at?" I said one day to The Mailman as he sat at the computer. "Ubuntu", he said. Tempted to say bless you but suspcious already about what was coming next I said, "Oh, what's that?" An operating system, he said; we should put it on the laptop, he said. I'll order a disk from the Netherlands and create more postage, he said. When do you think it will come, he said. "Just when you've forgotten about it", came my standard reply to such questions.
Well, he must have forgotten about it on Wednesday, because that's when it came. Eagerly he opened it and looked it over as he waited for one of the children to bring him the laptop from its perch in the attic. With visions of sugarplums and a rocket-like ascent into the stratosphere of geekiness dancing in his head, the disk was slipped into the drive.
Were we through the looking glass? No, not yet. Not until the moment that I made the decision and said "Yeah, go ahead and install it over the Windows if you want." Or maybe it was the moment that ubuntu didn't install quite right on the laptop and he declared "I knew I should have gotten xubuntu instead. It's for older machines." Maybe it was when he spent 2 hours downloading xubuntu and burning it to a disc, or maybe it was when I spent half an hour installing xubuntu, or maybe when that didn't install right either...I'm not really sure anymore.
All I'm sure of is that the laptop needs me again. Can I bring it back one more time? We'll have to wait and see. Until then, I have at least learned two things. One, beware of husbands muttering strange words after listening to podcasts. Being alone in the hot sun inside of an aluminum can of a truck for hours and listening to geeky gurus can put crazy ideas into a person's head. And second, like Leo always says, before you do something to your computer, always back it up. Turns out, that's good advice.