Dusty old blog...

I don't know if anyone is still looking at this with any avidity, but I apologize for the long delay between posts. I've been busy with other projects and had a cluster of hardware/computer difficulties. That being said, I hope to add some more stuff here on a fairly regular basis (isn't that the comment that always dooms a website?)

So to start off, or perhaps to catch up, here's what I've been working on in no particular order:
A pair of little, old panasonic laptops (CF-25, CF-M32 sub-note) that Gary gave me. One had a broken DOS installation, and the other had a buggy win98 installation. I wiped them both and then worked (and worked and worked) to get linux on them. The trick as it turns out, is that the little guy (CF-m32), which is about the size of a paperback book has no floppy/cdrom so trying to get data onto it once you've wiped the operating system is very hard. I ended up taking thing to pieces and pulling the hard drive. After patching the drive to my desktop system and getting a basic Debian installation running on it, I was able to update/install over the network.

The CF-25 is an armored laptop (drive over it with your car, drop it, clobber someone with it) and it's pretty pokey. But it has a swapable floppy and CD-ROM drive, but still it was a challenge, as you can't boot from the CD-rom and there's no USB. Also during the many attemps to install something happened with the MBR that made it...resistant to any further monkeying. I pulled the same trick: pull the drive mount it in my desktop, and wipe the sucker spotless, then reinstall. Now it runs debian as well, albeit too slowly to be of much use (except at the command line, which I'm still shakey with). The upside is that I've learned a tremendous amount about linux, command line work, hardware, and general geekiness.

During all of this, Meredith's laptop decided to die (power-in came off the motherboard) so I pulled the hard drive out of my laptop and plugged hers in. This gave her some functionality so she could continue to work. Then my desktop winxp installation got seriously corrupt and took the MBR with it as well, so I did a re-install, and went with Ubuntu (an extremely user-friendly linux distro) and I like it.

Last weekend Meredith got a new laptop (due to a financial angel who co-signed for her at compusa) and I got my case back. So now I'm back to my old laptop (which seems so dodgy and worn out compared to Merediths shiny new Toshiba), but I still pine for a 12" Mac. Maybe if I get a raise this month.....