Baby steps.

The compact Debian GNU/Linux install went fine. There were some options I hadn't seen before from previous installs under VMware which was to be expected, some I didn't understand. It dialled out first time through the card modem on Mr. Generic that there had been problems with.

First up: Checkinstall, linux-wlan, The Circle, some Python tutorials.

It must say something about me that the most fun I've had in recent weeks was running three copies of the same Debian GNU/Linux install (with Checkinstall installed) concurrently under VMware - hundreds of browser windows and tabs to crawl through it at 28.8k. Can't yet find a way to use Squid or other caching (wwwoffle?) to bring up all those browser windows intact after a  reboot. I was attracted to this technique by the following quote:

Redo files can be nested multiple times. This leads to another trick for advanced users, of providing undoable disk capability, at multiple points in time.

I'd like to be doing this sort of thing with the Familiar distribution, but don't know a lot about emulation, or if it's possible.

As it is the slow news season, I'll play a game on Win: Collapse. F3+4 or F3+8 takes you to those levels if the early ones are too slow for you. F3+s toggles sound.