As I’ve hinted in a few posts, I received new machines for work. (Thanks Chuck!) I got a laptop and a desktop, both Dells, and I’m happy with both of them. I setup the desktop first, and was able to install Fedora Core 3 on it and move my existing home directory and configurations over to it fairly easy. My previous desktop was running RedHat 9, but things pretty much stayed the same. The big boost is the dual-monitors, which are growing more on me everyday. The key point on the desktop is I could move in without doing a lot of stuff.

I unpackaged the laptop this afternoon and started working on it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it came with Windows XP Professional with SP2. I figured we would have ordered the cheapest OS possible and done a reinstall when it arrived (since we have licenses for all the MS software we need.) Because everything was pre-installed, I can just work from there. It’s even nicer that the built in BIOS/OS functions, like the volume buttons and such, work out of the box. But, now it’s time to install software. What’s the first must-install packages you add? Here’s what I did so far:

1. McAfee VirusSan (8.0 version)
2. Firefox
3. WinZip
4. WinAmp

Trillian and Cygwin will be added soon. Acrobat, Flash, and Thunderbird will be installed soon too. The VPN client, some sort of SSH client (putty or the SSH.com licensed one,) TeraTerm Pro (for serial console access,) Microsoft Office, iTunes, QuickTime, Tivo Desktop (heh heh)… Anything else I’m missing?