Nothing much to say about this week other than drawing breath was certainly a mistake.

On the computer side of things, I fried my system by shorting the power supply on the motherboard. That was certainly an "oops" moment. PSU dead (replacing), heatsink OR processor dead (replacing heatsink), 512mb ram possibly dead (buying another dimm anyway), motherboard possibly dead (replacing to be safe), gfx card possibly damaged, 11 bad blocks on one of the 120gb drives (8 on old ntfs partition, 3 on root reiserfs -- both OS's unbootable), and maybe the optical drives are damaged, too (can't play/boot dvds. Whether that's this OS/motherboard/bios, I don't know).

The replacement parts were meant to be delivered today but weren't. Couriers probably have a lot of lifesize teddy bears to deliver or something. I can't even get through to the dispatch office to tell them to send it to my home address and not work. Maybe the delivery will come tomorrow (the regular driver knows me) but it's more likely to be Monday.

Shit, and I was downloading gnoppix, too! Makes me wish I'd have just bought a copy when I ordered a Debian Woody dvd.

If I don't get my package tomorrow, I'm going to break down and install SuSE on this box (this installation of XP is hosed). After I've repaired the drives as best I can, of course. Apparently, using dd to write to the bad blocks will force the drive to remap them to the end. I won't be able to use it for anything other than storage after this, though :/

But I should be installing Debian on a new system tomorrow or Monday. That's if I don't need a new processor as well. Trouble is I'm too broke to buy one now.

The worst thing is the whine from this athlon...so goddamn loud and I have to sleep with it if I want to continue getting gnoppix. Moving it into another room would mean rebooting, and rebooting would disrupt the torrent I'm getting (hint: Rhymes with "stilton"), as well as gnoppix and goldfrapp albums.

Happy Friday the 13th.

As Captain Jack Sparrow would say, "That's interesting."

Tried GNOME 2.2.2 yesterday after the slashdot article and I like it. I like it a lot.

My expectations were pretty low. The slashdot groupthink seems to be that KDE is polished and GNOME is a rough around the edges. Maybe that's true from a developer's perspective but from a user's point of view, it's the exact opposite.

Every aspect of the interface is much more consistant than KDE. From menus to panel applets, it fits together seamlessly. And, even under high load, it's more responsive than KDE.

It looks nothing like Windows which I like but I'm sure this is one of the primary reasons that people dislike it. I think it's more like MacOS and that's a good thing.

Obligatory pseudo-transparent xterm screenshot (1600x1200 0.85 jpeg, 315k). Ximian Industrial theme with Gorilla icons. Wallpaper.

Pirates of the Caribbean is great, too.

Tuesday:

Upgraded gnome to 2.4, playing with apt4rpm, looking at garnome. apt4rpm doesn't seem stellar, going to try installing Debian stable...and then garnome on that. So much to learn.

I bought a geforce fx the other day (support nvidia for their linux efforts by buying shitty cards etc.) and tucked in the box are 6 games that don't run on linux.

Getting a little bored of q3, I rebooted into xp. God, that was a mistake. Windows has fucked up the USB host controller so my Microsoft Explorer mouse is no longer useable. Explorer.exe keeps crashing and the whole thing is pretty unusable.

Anyway, I'm bored and want to kill stuff (games like splinter cell and max payne), so what's my best option? Reinstall xp and keep it off the net (~3 hours w/ backups)? Buy a PS2 (~200 quid w/ splinter cell and max payne 1 & 2)?

Transgaming's selection is even worse than tux games' so playing anything under linux seems to be a non-starter.

Bah. /bitter

alias TCPA='chown corporate_america\: /*'

I've never used linux before but now I know the truth I can't go back to windows. Not now, not ever.

The thing that sent me over the edge was the RPC server exploit. I should have patched it way before I got hit but I was negligent. So I patched it and then ran windowsupdate, installing all the other fixes that I'd missed. Big mistake. That update fubared XP.

What do you do? Handy-dandy 'system restore' of course! But now I have to apply the RPC patch again...b-but it won't work because the cryptograpic service is buggered. Knowledge base says to reinstall SP1 and run some commands, so I do that. Still doesn't work. On the plus side windows is so fucked up that the RPC worm isn't a problem any more.

I am sick of this shit. I've stuck with XP because it worked and was reliable; I used phoenix and thunderbird, apache and postgresql, and it all just ticked along merrily. Bah.

On a whim I bought SuSE 8.2 personal (it was half the price of professional :|) from amazon. Partitioned, installed. Easy enough. Modem doesn't work. Google from XP, goto linmodem.org, download RPM. Yay, modem works. Might be an idea for YAST to say "You have a shitty win-modem, buddy" or something. Blah-blah-blah, can't really remember. Patch with online update, download a dozen RPMs to get mplayer working (need porn), scared of trying to install nvidia drivers. Fonts in firebird not anti-aliasing no matter what build or RPM I download. Choose wrong sound driver for nforce2.

Then I realize that while a 40gb reiser partition is neat, I can't read or write to it from windows. Conversely, I can't write to either of the NTFS partitions. Also, I can't manage to configure FSTAB to let users read mounted windows drvies. Bleh, might as well reinstall and repartiton.

Done and done. Partitions automagically become readable. Found gtk2+xft firebird built on SuSE 8.2 -- works, no more jagged fonts! Plucked up the 'courage' to install nvidia driver after uninstalling the YOU updated kernal (otherwise I need the source -- which doesn't come with personal -- to recompile).

As of now, the only issues I have are: TV-OUT (can't get this working, last time I tried it the display on the CRT wacked out) and CBQ (mldonkey is swamping my crappy winmodem).

After two installs, maybe about 5hrs getting things to just 'work', and windows and its viruses can rot in hell.