In line with my thinking about doing a tortoise... taking a working environment with me, I decided I want a decent linux to go with the toolset. Talking to Martin at Wileys, the idea of running a virtual OS came up, which has its attractions. Except I have a nasty taste in my mouth from my last contact with VMware. I paid for a licence, VMWare salesman stoutly saying it all works... and it didn't. Bloody waste of money. There are others, but I'm cautious with my main PC, and that of others. Equally so of dual booting a PC to one or the other, apart from which who the heck wants to dual boot every ... whatever, minutes. Anyway. I found liveusb-creator, which sounded good. I downloaded FC10 Live, ran liveusb-creator and created my bootable pen drive! Simple. Except it failed. I tried it on my IBM Thinkpad x40 which hs a weird boot sequence. I may have selected a wrong boot source (F12 for those with an X machine, whilst booting), since I selected the device, not the .. whatever it is 'within the device'. Anyway; I redid the exercise on Windows exactly the same, and hey presto, when I booted, up came Fedora Core 10! Good as gold. Dummy user, which I corrected by providing a password for root, adding a user etc. Fixed the Lan access (via wifi) in about 30 seconds and I had a working system! Fully connected.

I'm impressed. My device (Amazon.co.uk may be slow - Firefox takes an age to fully open, but the comparison, less than twenty quid compared to 326 for a 128Gb SSD disk? No contest, I'll be patient. I'll wait for the OS to catch up but it does what I want. All the Linux|Unix utils available, I really wouldn't like to go back to DOS batch files. Makes a far better environment.

Nice little experiment which makes me more the capable tortoise!