Homeschool day 40 of 180
Government school day 32 of 175½

As suspected, I had to spend most of the evening fixing the homeschool computer after I got home yesterday afternoon. I got rid of all the games (except Civilization IV), backed up our photographs on the Linux computer, did exhaustive virus and spyware scans, defraged, etc., etc. The computer really seems to be running a lot better now. While I was at it, I backed up all of our home videos of the kids from CD-ROM’s onto the Linux hard drive. The windows computer is getting pretty old, so I went ahead and got another low end Windows XP computer to use for the two homeschool programs we use that do not run on Linux. These two programs are Rosetta Stone Spanish and World Book Encyclopedia 2006. The kids also use Microsoft Publisher for their Kaktus Kids magazine, but that is not part of homeschool. The new computer cost less than $360 including shipping. The plan is to turn the old computer into an Ubuntu file and printer server with a big hard disk drive over the holidays when my brother-in-law Jorge is here from Mexico.

I heard that “Edgy Eft”, the next version of Ubuntu Linux is coming out on October 26.  I understand that it is a little bit of a bleeding edge version, so I think I will wait until July to upgrade.  We actually use the KDE based Kubuntu version of Ubuntu as I use KDevelop to work on a number of programming projects.  We do all of our homeschool planning and word processing on the Linux computer, too, so it is our most mission critical computer.  The “Feisty Fawn” version 7.04 will be coming out in April of next year.  I expect to have the time and inclination to upgrade to that version as soon as the school year is over.