Nerdbloke

Uh oh – I borked my dapper dist-upgrade. Whilst the upgrade was underway I was prompted a few times with “overwrite this file?”, “overwrite that file?” questions. Seems like I stuffed it…

Below is just a little reminder of where my windows boot loader is for when I do a clean install of Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Last night I downloaded the new free versions of:
- VMWare server last night.
- MS’s Virtual PC 2004.

I’d played with a free (then warezed) version of Virtual PC 2004 before and was pretty impressed.

Well, I am writing this in virtual (VMWare) version of the the latest Ubuntu offering. I must say it’s even better than MS’s offering.

I can’t really offer too much in the way of insight into the newer version of Ubuntu as I’ve only just installed literally seconds ago. But the way VMWare cranks along – yeah I like it. And free is good too. And this is on an ancient machine with only 512MB of RAM.

The only problem I had was that it installed the virtual HDD as a SCSI rather than IDE. No biggy though – took all of 1 minute to find and fix.

Must go – world of warcraft awaits…

Cruising the net the other day I saw that Puppy Linux had a two point zero release. I had tried Puppy a long time ago, and whilst inpressed with it power-to-weight-ratio, it just didn’t have enough good stuff to keep me interested.

I fired up Virtual PC and booted a virtual PC from an ISO of the puppy2.0_Opera version. It looked pretty sweet and was quite responsive. I then ran the HDD installer. It was brain dead easy. After a ‘reboot’ – remember this is on VirtualPC – I was running it as a dedicated Puppy installation.

First thing to do was download Firefox 1.5, install IceWM window manager plus some nice themes. All this was done via the DotPup ‘package mgmt system’. Made it very easy. This quick test convinced me that I was ready to take the next step… Install Puppy on my aging laptop. The specs of the laptop:
– Acer TravelMate 512T
– 333 MHz CPU (Pentium II Celeron)
– 64 MB RAM
– 4 GB HDD
– Synaptic touchpad
– Ethernet via PCMIA
– Video 800×600 16 bit colour

I wasn’t holding out much hope for recognition of the touchpad and ethernet adaptor, but everything had been so promising that I thought it was worth the effort. Worst case scenario was that my junk laptop remained a junk laptop. If all worked well my junk laptop would once again be a contributing member of my nerdly pursuits.

Double thumbs up!! I am typing this in my loungeroom while TOWMBO is playing games on the PC in the study. I can’t believe how repsonsive this piece-of-crap laptop is. Granted it’s only being used for web surfing and perhaps emergency work for Word/Excel/Email stuff, but for a laptop that is several generations behind it’s use-by-date I am very impressed.

Only one thing wrong with this install that I have not been able to figure out. When I go to shut down or reboot I get the shell is all blue. The background is blue, the text is blue. Makes it very difficult to see what I am typing. It’s kinda bizarre – after selecting “Start > Logout > Shutdown” I still have to type “poweroff” in the shell to poweroff, and then that stops the HDD and CPU (I think) but I still have to hit the button to REALLY turn the PC off. But I havent really started looking for a solution to that yet, it may be that I have selecteed a dodgy video mode…

Overall I am totally impressed with Puppy Linux 2.00 release. Fantastic stuff. My laptop has a new lease of life and I am thinking of installing on my folks PC when they next ask me to “fix” it.