Fun weekend, spent Sunday helping a friend install Linux for the first time, Mepis, this was one of the more rewarding experiences I've had lately. My friend kept pointing out cool things linux did that windows didn't, things that I long ago accepted as normal, he was amazed by the number of programs that were preinstalled, we installed flash and java, didn't bother with mp3 and libdvdcss as he has no speakers at this time, that is a project for another day, we installed the ati drivers, this was to easy. He quickly got the hang of the file system and was intrigued by the command line, I told him to check out learn Unix in 10 minutes by freeengineer.org, this is a great resource for new users and those new to the command line. Synaptic was another revelation , with the debian repositories enabled there was an amazing collection of packages available, I'm used to this kind of choice but my friend seemed to have trouble believing it was all free. I explained the idea that software should be free as in speech and free as in beer, the philosphy behind it real got him excited, that he could give it to anyone and install it on as many machines as he liked. We setup his machine as a dual boot with Windows but when I offered to test the link to Windows in grub his response was "Oh, I'm not going back to that." I will hold his hand over the coming weeks, but I think we have a convert!