It's courts martial A marshal is something else and Marshall is only an amplifier (though the later series will go up to 11 :) )

Apparently, in the Rolls-Royce car factory, they referred to them as Rollses-Royce :)

1. You get the chance to overspec case silencing components, slow running fans / fanless configuration. You woun't care about noise - until you do

2. You get to specify memory specs / hard drive specs / processors

3. You get the chance to specify your graphics card - especially useful if you're dual booting Linux

4. You get the chance to specify a case size that you can work with / no tool assembly

5 If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces - but you can also upgrade at your own pace

Not enough details here to make informed advice try the following for a start:

Questions. Is the company reliant on IT? What is it worth in £million? Do they care about IT enough for you to make a huge fuss and be listened to?

If you are just a Linux admin - and they've lots of Windows admins in a huge company - you are a small cog in a large, crushing machine. If you are supposed to be bringing up their Linux skills and nothing more, do that to the best of your ability and leave.

If your job is to transition some (more) of their estate to Linux AND you have the remit to do it:

Talk to the beancounters about risk management: costs of change vs. vulnerabilities vs costs of remediation
* Make friends with the Windows administrators. Get them to share their main pain points with you: work co-operatively to produce a hitlist of things they want to
see fixed as far as you can
* Bring what Linux machines you have up to date: get patching for these handled correctly.
* Work out where you can usefully expand the Linux estate to fix the Windows admins hitlist.
Then grow out gradually

If you get to talk security posture, hardening, firewalls

Talk to the beancounters about risk management: costs of damage from penetration/loss of data vs. vulnerabilities vs costs of remediation

Either of Peter I island or Bouvet Island. Both isolate dependencies of Norway - so overall state surveillance shouldn't be a problem. Physical geography means they're unlikely to be snooped on by unfriendly governments.

And can't be compiled with open source tools - there's a reason it's in Debian contrib rather than main. Also - a whole load of functionality, like functioning USB - depends on Oracle non-free components and extensions. Oracle and licensing is a no-no for any FLOSS developer.

Competent CTO - check.
White House CTO - check

MIT and Google - check.

Woman - check. Cue misogyny on all sides.

Parent - check. Cue incredulity that she can combine work and family life.

Lesbian - check. Oh, that's OK - her marital status gets a mention as does the fact that she's separated (so presumably her estranged wife is looking after the kids for her.)

Any chance of a sensible in depth, hard hitting article detailing how well she's doing in the teeth of opposition, lack of mandate and innate technical conservatism?

I first learned how to spell "coronal"

Ken's real - and is working hard in Texas as ever he was. Helios Project - affiliated with SPI - joined with another charity Reglue and they're still attempting to get computers to needy children and adults locally to them.

Most Germans speak and write better English than I do - and I'm posting this from the UK. For German, at least, it probably doesn't help to have had several attempts at reforming German orthography within the last 30 years.In the same period, I _think_ Dutch has had one major spelling reform.

+1 to the person suggesting formal German hochdeutsch: also, for the historically inclined, it may now be safe to start teaching how to read fraktur / black letter type again or the German speaking nations will miss out entirely on the original books and literature pre 1930 or so.

I don't have a business support contract with Oracle - I don't actually have any obviously Oracle products here at the moment.

If I _DID_ have a business support contract with Oracle for any product, I think thiis would persuade me that my money was wasted: this sort of little thing drags down a big business reputation. Oracle may have fantastic databases, middleware, people management software, hardware, Linux OS, Java - in rough order of importance to Oracle - but this shows that they can't be trusted to do well with small things.I'd trust their lawyers to draft a good contract, favourable to them but I can't trust them to know their own products, own codebase or even what they have to do with them.

Run, don't walk away from Oracle products as fast as you practicably can or find someone else to support them for you at added cost to you since you can't rely on Oracle and produce a backout plan to move your business away from Oracle dependence immediately.

If you've been a student - get recommendations from your supervisors. Carry some academic credentials so that you can get to universities / higher education institutes / academic libraries. If you can afford it, take a course in a European universtiy for a semester or two. Connectivity may well be the biggest / most expensive problem.

Hammer out visas ahead of time - make contingency arrangements to transfer money - one of the hardest things will probably be moving living expenses around.

Find software developers to hang around with in the areas you're moving to next. contribute to FLOSS in an international team before you go?

Be prepared to learn (human) languages as needed, even if only enough to order food from a street stall / cafe or whatever. Be prepared to live like a local and life is always easier.

Wubi

Virtualbox and a standard virtual image

Pack an ubuntu mirror - if network access is slow, it will help.

As others have suggested, LTSP will work if you set the machines to boot from the network.