As I have mentioned on the show, I recently published a review of my new laptop on my blog and just wanted to let you all know. I am actually running Debian lenny/sid on it right now and have moved the whole production environment over to it so everything should be much more reliable now. I love this machine! What a wonderful Linux laptop…

As I have mentioned before, I was in dire need for a new production machine since my current laptop was getting very unreliable. This week, my shiny new Dell XPS m1330 arrived at my doorstep. The thing has 4 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive and generally kicks ass all around. I am currently in the process of setting up the new machine and moving all my production assets over. I have already installed Mint 4.0 on it after I couldn’t get Ubuntu Studio (which I wanted to use originally) to even recognize the soundcard properly. So much for audio/video editing on that thing. Go figure…

Anyway, Mint runs great and supports all the features of the laptop out of the box. Even the media remote and build-in camera work. The fingerprint reader and build-in microphone are the only two things that need additional packages (which I am not going to bother with right now).

I expect to have everything moved over and set up by tomorrow. This means that we will have another little delay with the podcast this week but I am determined not to drop this week’s show. Please bear with us. This upgrade was a necessary step and I think a reliable recording and production machine will benefit the podcast in general a lot. I will give a detailed review on my experience with this laptop (along with photos of the unboxing) soon.

Due to the fact that my system crashed several times during the editing of episode 13, the release of that show will be delayed for at least a day. I am really sorry to keep you waiting, but I have to redo several significant portions of the master edit because of the crashes. I really need a new computer, I think…

Please excuse the inconvenience, I do expect to have this thing out the door by sunday night if my system isn’t dying again. I am not superstitious at all, but it seems 13 really is an unlucky number after all.