Now that the grades are posted, the final papers shuffled through and sorted, the last emails sent, I can wash my hands of that most horrible of teachers - Davis. I will not bother to eulogise him and that class further than this. He doesn't deserve it. My students did deserve better than that, and I can only hope that they obtained some satisfaction out of my section, and are gentle with their evaluations :) It's over! That means summer is here - icecream, sunburns, languid afternoons spent over a book, beach sand crusting around your ankles... before all that, I did promise an account of my recent migration to Linux.
Migration. I wonder why it is thought of in that way- migration; it conjures up images of catastrophe, of drought or war, or some natural inevitable directive, like the impulses that pull wildebeest across the Serengeti. It is an odd metaphor to use for such a mechanistic event, we think of migration in terms of nature do we not? Birds migrate, not computers! Still, migrate I did, though I fought the impulse to do so for quite some time.
I bought my first distribution off EBay in 2002. Looking back that was a strange thing to do - after all the GPL is all about the free distribution of information. I suppose I wanted some kind of structure, some thing that I could obtain this revolutionary OS from. It is hard to think of a complete operating system being available for free to anyone with an internet connection and time on their hands. It seems so...hackerish...so illegal...you got what off the internet??
Well, I tried to install it a couple of times, foolishly thinking that I could do so from within Windows..haha, how silly I was..of course it did not work so I shelved my Mandrake 9.0 CD's and continued to fight with Windows - blue screens, crashes, frequent reboots, programs freezing..well, you know what it's like I am sure. All the while wishing that I could just screw up the guts to just jump over to the dark side...the penguin side..hehehe...
Fast forward a couple of years to around March when I fix my bf's computer just in time to prevent some nasty territorial disputes around the 'puter - we both use the computer heavily, him to browse his favourite lefty sites and plot GW's overthrow and I because the computer is my life; music, movies, games, work, you name it I do it on my computer.
Flush with that success, I decide that now is the time to make my move. I do my research on sites like Distrowatch, Linux Forums and many many others and I pick Slackware as my distribution of choice; fast, stable and most importantly, not Windows! I picked Slackware on the strength of the Slax live CD which runs right off your CD-ROM drive, loads itself into your system RAM and doesn't touch your OS or HD at all. It's basically a whole OS that runs off a single CD - marvellous. Well I ran Slax for a couple of weeks and loved it, the look and feel of KDE, the security from pop-ups and nasty spyware and adware and the fact that it detected and configured all my hardware correctly. So I figured, what the hell! I'll give the real deal a spin.
I did not realise that Slackware was not the faint of heart...it uses the command line heavily for all configuration, tweaking and generally all customisation that you'll need to do to get it running to your liking. Needless to say, I was not anywhere near ready for that kind of heavy, non-GUI using work. I did however manage to compile a kernel all by my lonesome, rassled extensively with LILO (and hated it to death) and began to realise that a dual-boot configuration was not going to work. Why? Basically, my Windows HD partition table was fucked up by Partition Magic 8, the Windows MBR was overwritten by LILO and I had no idea how to recover it. Panic!! All my files were still on my Windows HD - years and years of mp3's, documents, programs all suddenly inacessible, including the paper I was working on that was due in a couple of days. I was in despair...until I began to google a bit and realised that I could mount my windows HD from a live CD, read my files and salvage my paper...yay!
Sick of Slackware, I formatted the partitions on my second HD and after much searching, I settled on Fedora Core 1. I fell in love from the moment I saw the lovely graphical anaconda installer and we have been a happy couple for almost a month now. Last week I wanted to gve SuSE 9.1 a try, and I formatted my windows HD completely and installed SuSe right over it. I don't like SuSe 9.1 too much, it looks and feels too much like Windows, much of the config is done auto-magically and after Fedora Core 1 I miss the control. What I don't miss is windows..once I transferred my files to my bigger HD I had no more need for Windows. I think I will use my former windows HD to try out other distributions but for me, this is it! No more windows...I'm freeee!
Next week, the bf and I are going down to spend a week at his parent's house on Hilton Head. Sun, sea, sand and some well earned relaxation. I can't wait.
posted by WM @ 15:58
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