I'm impressed you're going to try out Ubuntu! You'll probably have to install it from a USB stick:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

Let me know how you get on.

It seems that MS has quashed the initial early stand that Linux made on netbooks.

This afternoon I'm collecting my shiny new netbook (n110). It comes with XP. I look forward to trying Ubuntu on it, I think there is even a netbook tailored version. I'm also confident that I'll …

Thanks Will, I've updated my post to correct the muddled terminology you pointed out.

You're right, of course, you can have SSO without the ID scheme. But even those have an identity provider, which will be subject to government requests to allow access to consolidated information about people. Better not to have that all together in one place.

And what concerns me is that …

Actually, Yahoo! does not implement directed identity. They DO support identifier select along with an opaque identifier, but the identifier is the same for every relying party. I actually wrote on this topic yesterday: http://willnorris.com/p/797

But you can have SSO without a government ID card scheme. OpenId gives you that, and you can use it now. My point is that SSO should be left out of the ID card debate, it's not relevant.

In the link you give, Peter Williams writes: "The identity provider would, of course, understand that all these single use identities are really all part of the same identity." That's the problem with the the SSO that really interests me: the UK government's ID card/ID database. The identity provider …

While I'm in the mood for sounding off, I'm not entirely pleased with Dell's behaviour. Janos at work bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v.

It comes with Ubuntu installed, but it's not the standard Ubuntu distribution, it's been tinkered with by Dell, mostly for the worse Janos found. So he …

I read Glyn Moody's writings with interest, but with his post Why Single Sign On Systems Are Bad I think he's made a rare slip. Here's a note to Glyn on why I think he's wrong on this occasion:

You conflate single sign-on (SSO) and single identity. OpenId lets you …

We went to see this at the Little Theatre yesterday. It was a good film for a number of reasons:

• It had the tension and excitement of a thriller.
• The aesthetic of grubby hi-tech was well done.
• The technology was believable.
• Its characters were interesting.
• The dialogue was well written …