I recently decided to reinstall my operating systems, both XP and the recently-released Ubuntu 9.04 codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. The main reason for doing this was the release of Jaunty and that XP was getting sluggish because of all the bloat of the updates I was installing unknowingly. At first, I tried installing Vista lite, the one that floated around the torrents and is a stripped-down version of Vista Ultimate that fits in a single CD. It was fast, but after a few updates it went sluggish and started warning me that my copy might be a pirated one. Heh. I then proceeded to install the 64-bit version of Jaunty, letting Vista lite sit in there for a while. I ran into an issue where grub, a Linux boot manager/loader, wasn't able to find the Jaunty installation, so I decided to reinstall it and made sure I installed grub in the hard-drive where Jaunty is also installed. It worked, and after a few minutes of tweaking Jaunty, I decided to check out my Vista lite install. Grub started spewing error messages one after another basically telling me that it can't load my Vista lite installation. After doing some fixes that I know of, it left me frustrated. This issue wouldn't have happened if my IDE drive had a jumper that placed it in Master mode. I don't know how it happened, but I lost that jumper and was running my operating systems while the IDE drive was in Slave mode. I decided to make a jumper of my own so I can set my hard drive to Master. It worked. I then decided to reformat and reinstall my legal copy of XP as I realized that Vista lite was going to cause me trouble in the long run. After loading all the drivers for my desktop, and making sure I installed all the software I needed, I then proceeded to install Jaunty Jackalope, but this time, I decided to use the 32-bit version, because Adobe AIR apps, and more particularly, Adobe AIR, still has issues running 32-bit libraries installed in a 64-bit environment. I simply just can't let go of my AIR apps. Maybe in a few months, Adobe AIR gets updated and have 64-bit libraries for 64-bit Ubuntu releases. Here's me hoping Adobe does something about it. For now, all is quite well, and so far, Jaunty is living up to the hype of being a more performance-oriented release of the much loved Ubuntu distro. Hats off to Canonical for another great release.