So far so good. Flawless install of Ubuntu 6.06 (desktop) from cd, (well, flawless the second time – first time hung creating the ext3 filesystem after 15%).
I have no idea what the root password on this system is. I can sudo anything I want, so why would I care (I think that’s the reasoning).
Firefox is up and running like a champion.
First job was to fetch and install Thunderbird and configure it to point to fastmail.fm. Thunderbird is going to be a better choice than Evolution because last time I checked (about 4 days ago) Evolution still couldn’t cope with the zillions of public folders that my work IMAP server publishes, whereas Thunderbird happily ignores them. Next job is to configure Thunderbird to point to mail.hp.com and confirm this assertion.