Where's GLaDOS? That's was a joke. Haha. Fat chance.

I had a friend suggest to me something a ways back that I thought was pretty clever.

If you're ssh'ing to your box for a proxy from say, work, you might not be able to get out since outbound connections might be disallowed by your company's firewall (or what have you). Even if outbound connections on 22 (or whatever oddball port you're running your ssh server on) are allowed, weird traffic like that might raise some eyebrows and get you in trouble.

My friend's idea was to have ssh running on port 443 on your proxy box provided you don't have a web server using ssl running. Pretty much any firewall that has a website behind it has 80 and 443 open. In addition, 443 is ssl encrypted so when your encrypted ssh traffic goes through it, it hopefully won't raise much suspicion.

It kinda depends on how you want to do post-install management, but for duplicating a computer, you could always use the dd command in ubuntu. The catch is all of your duplicate drives must be exactly the same size or larger than your source drive or you will have file system boundary issues. Dd should do the trick though as it will create a bit-for-bit duplicate of anything. That includes filesystems. One problem might be thoughthat all of your windoes boxes will be using the same copy/license of windows.

I'm a bit frustrated with a lot of the GUIs available right now as well. The new Gnome 3 wont let you use any of the new/cool effects without having a graphics 'powerhouse', not to mention it is slow and memory hungry. The new KDE 4 is really cool and I think very functional, but a bit memory hungry as well. Unity I just don't like. I searched around for a while and stumbled upon xfce, e17, and lxde. Lxde is really REALLY fast, and super small. Its also extremely customizable. However, its a bit too customizable for my liking. A bit too much setup work. I'd happily run it though. E17 is really shiny, and strangely small and fast in light of this. Finally Xfce is my favorite. Its the closest thing to gnome 2 I can get, and it is small and super fast. It even works with all of the gnome taskbar Widgets. Just a few other options for you there.