Definitely one of those days where computers are concerned. Time for a little walk and a couple of beers, I think. But first - Scylla, if you've had any joy with Wubi, it'd be interesting to hear how you made it work.

I copied an iso of UNR to the laptop's hard drive, installed Wubi and told it to install UNR. (I disconnected the wireless connection to avoid it spending hours on the internet again.) I also shrank its space from the default 12gb to 5gb.

Things didn't go too badly - much along the lines of the Dedoimedo tutorial, in fact - until we got to the stage where after a couple of reboots it actually tried to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

This took three tries, using different boot options ("ACPI Workarounds" seemed to do the trick - it is old-fashioned hardware, which may have confused things a little.

I got to a stage where I could launch UNR and sign in. Every time I tried to launch any app, though, it started to open then minimised to the taskbar after a second or so. A couple of reboots didn't help, and un-minimising simply opened the app for a second before it scuttled coyly back to the task bar.

I couldn't even get the shut-down menu open and visible long enough to shut down, and had to keep using the power switch.

There were no complaints about insufficient space during the installation and in any event, it looks as if it should be installable to a 4gb netbook drive.

To add insult to injury I could, in the time it took for Wubi to install UNR, have easily manually repartitioned the hard drive and installed Linux in a conventional dual-boot - not sure whether 10.04 is a slow installer, perhaps, but that seems unlikely.

So right at the moment I see very little point to Wubi. Grrrr... But lots of people find it great. Perhaps it doesn't like Windows 2000. Or the Thinkpad's 1.13ghz CPU (but it has 512mb RAM). Or VBox's 384mb RAM (but that did have a 2.4ghz CPU)

But simply dual-booting Linux and Windows conventionally really ain't that hard, and things seem to work so much better...

Time for walkies, then a hefty dose of LIB (Linux-Induced-Beer.) Scylla - hope you're making more headway than me today...