C3ntaur's Journal: Evil Empire Redux

OK, so I think I've found a compromise I can live with. I became a beta tester for VMWare and found that their latest release candidate of WS 5.5 works marvelously under FC4, my current Linux distro. When it's fully released, I will definitely be sending them a check for licenses on both my desktop and my laptop.

I bought copies of XP Pro and Visio 2003 Pro off eBay for a decent price, sellers said they were from a defunct company that never used them. They appear to be authentic, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise. Either way, I figure at least I'm not *directly* supporting the Evil Empire.

I proceeded to install XP Pro in a virtual machine, and then ran Windows Update (good grief, how many fricken' times do I have to reboot??). Finally I installed Visio. I now have Windows in its own rubber room where it can't hose up my computer, and using shared host folders I can move data in and out of it easily. The VM is plenty fast enough for what I'm doing, though I don't think I'd want to try to run a FPS game in it (fortunately, there are some pretty good ones that run in Linux: My latest discovery is America's Army, and they have a native Linux client available for free download).

Anyway, my problem is solved for the time being, but I still feel kinda dirty touching Windows again.