It’s been a good week. I’ve finally taken on some work after a month or so spent learning new stuff, plus I feel motivated about doing it.

Today it became a bad week. My Macbook wouldn’t start up this morning, the only life from the hard drive being some nasty ticking sounds. Oh dear I thought. A quick tinker with Disk Utility and System Profiler led me to the conclusion that the drive was in fact dead!

I dropped it off at my local Apple service centre and waved OS X goodbye for 1-2 weeks. Just as well I do regular backups and keep my working code in version control, I had only lost about 2 hours work at the most through the failure.

So what am I going to use in the meantime? I borrowed a laptop, and quickly set about replacing it’s Windows install with linux. I decided to go to my favourite distribution of late for my server, Ubuntu. A stroke of luck here, the new version came out today; 6.10 “Edgy Eft”. So now the AMD Athlon powered HP laptop in front of me is singing along updating itself with all the latest patches.

No doubt I’ll have more to say about my experiences in later posts, but for now I am left with the dilema; What IDE or editor for Ruby on linux?