Sunday we got our first chance for some up-close-and-personal time with the Audi and… well it was interesting. We’ve known from the start that the car needs some TLC, which isn’t to say its a bad car, it just needs a fair bit of wrenching before its ready to go. Currently as it sits the stock 20V Inline-5 motor has just been reunited with the transmission but not a lot else. So far we’ve managed to connect all the electrics, except for a wayward O2 sensor, and connected the starter. We’ve determined that the radiator is going to be a bit of a challenge since its a custom high capacity frankenstein job designed to be used in the Turbo motor that was previously in the car. This isn’t a road block, we’re just going to have to figure out some creative mounting and piping. We got to the point where we were ready to turn the key and see what happened but were thwarted by a dead battery and what turned out to be a seized alternator. Still, we should have the car mobile fairly soon and we can start working on making it street legal again which will pose its own interesting challenges.

The WRX is running well and I gave it its first interior vacuum yesterday, there were lovely reminders of Christmas all over the trunk in the form of pine needles. There’s not a lot of question about why the back bumper is scratched up. Good thing I’m not one to have a show-car. Anyone want to buy a 1993 Honda Civic Si Hatchback?

In non car news I finally got around to installing Ubuntu 7.04 on a machine today. I’m both pleased and disappointed with the newest release. On the plus side the installation gets smoother and smoother with every iteration. It takes less than half an hour to go from a paperweight to a fully running, configured and USEFUL Linux desktop complete with all the basic applications you might want. The eye-candy in 7.04 is very slick, even on the dated Radeon 7500 chipset of my T40 Thinkpad too. Unfortunately, however, they’ve taken a big step backwards in laptop support. Whereas 6.06 supported just about all the laptop oddities right out of the box like touch pad scrolling and ACPI suspending, 7.04 for some reason seems to have lost/broken them. I really don’t find the idea of going back and hand-fixing everything appealing. This is really a minor gripe though, if I were looking to use Ubuntu as my laptop/desktop full time it wouldn’t take long to correct these issues and the other improvements in this release would make it well worth it. Vista-what?