This offer comes in the wake of preparing me along with 100,000+ employees to brace for the imminent change—Windows Vista, and MS Office 2007, which roll onto our work notebooks within the next 3-12 months.

I have decided to take it, and hope that Microsoft delivers on its promise. This would enable me to exchange documents I create—between my Macbook and my Ubuntu running desktop—without loss of fidelity.

Update [22.8]: Here it is. I received the package yesterday.

The fun part, though, was the number of updates to it. SP1 (12.1.0) was 183MB, and then there was 12.1.1, which was ~160MB; and then just when I thought I was done, there was yet another update 12.1.2—another ~160MB. These updates are not for the faint internet connections!

I logged in via Failsafe Terminal and did the following—thanks to those instructions via Ubuntu forums.

1. cd /home
2. chown username:username username -R /home/username
3. cd username
4. chmod 755 * -R /home/username
5. chmod 644 .dmrc
6. chmod 644 .ICEauthority
7. exit
8.  
9. Download this example: /inputfiles/fix-ubuntu-login.txt

Stay away from using that Options menu in Ubuntu’s login screen.

Update: Replace username with your actual username in the commands above.