One thing I forgot to mention about my thus-far-successful adventure tuning my coworker’s VAIO … Xubuntu ran awfully slow on that machine. The live CD was so sluggish as to be unusable. It was PUD/GNU Linux that saved the day, by letting us boot to an extremely lightweight GUI and salvage files off her hard drive.

Of course, that does reinforce my unpopular campaign to have Xubuntu rebranded as a heavyweight desktop environment — something I’ve been touting since early this year. I know XFCE is technically a lighter desktop than Gnome, but there’s so much of them both in Xubuntu that I really don’t see a difference any more. If you want an XFCE *buntu that isn’t a tank, you’ll probably have to skip all the way back to Breezy … or build your own.

Be that as it may, PUD/GNU gets an extra gold star (or a green smiley, anyway) for doing what the big boys couldn’t do: Giving us a way to save files from the death spasm of Windows ME.