After literally 20+ hours of screwing around, I'm progressing further up the learning curve with my Gentoo install.

Right now I'd say that I've got a quite usable system, with the exception of the printer -- I still have to get it working. It's a USB printer and from what I've read, it should be supported.

From what I've read, a lot of people are pissed off because their "winmodem" doesn't have support under Linux. They're told to buy a "real" modem instead. I had relatively no trouble getting the driver I needed for my winmodem from Linuxant, although I had to pay something like $15 for the license. As I understand their FAQ, Linuxant has a development agreement with chipmaker Conexant to develop the drivers. The registration money goes back to Conexant, with a very small portion to Linuxant so that they can keep the lights on.

At any rate, the Linuxant driver works perfectly for me -- I'm very happy with it, and the $15 is not a big deal to me. A quote on their page says, "Linux is about freedom, not a free ride."

Got POPFile installed, so my work environment is getting very close to what my Windows environment used to be like.

Gentoo's "emerge" package installer is awesome. Right now I'm emerging "gnucash" in the bg. It checks all of the dependencies and downloads and compiles everything for you if needed.

It's all beginning to make sense.

Last night, after my ALSA install failed miserably, I decided to actually follow the instructions to the letter.

As I had no idea what I was doing when I started, I accepted all of Gentoo's default kernel options. Basically what this means is that I've compiled modules for all supported sound cards, since it has no idea what sound card I have.

So, per the instructions, I just went back and removed those that did not apply to my system, but left "sound card support" selected as a module, which should still generate a "soundcore.o". The compiliation of all modules is still going on in the background.

It's sweet that CTRL-INSERT and SHIFT-INSERT still work as I expect them to (after leaving Windows) under GNOME.

Couldn't find much info on getting dial-up networking to work without using KPPP, which is a part of KDE. I installed KDE and it seems that GNOME automatically recognizes the KDE apps. KPPP is one of them and was extremely easy to use and setup.

Actually I expected the script setup to be more involved. I didn't have to do anything! Earthlink is my ISP.

Next up is ALSA to get sound support working. This entry represents the first time online with Linux.

Gnome is installed with Mozilla. Almost there.

Got the docs online to install soundcard support, will also install dialup support next, so I don't have to keep coming over to Windows just to check e-mail and get more information off of the web.

Had to recompile the kernel to add support for my video card. This took an hour and I had some house wiring projects to do in the basement.

Installation instructions excellent (probably the best I've ever seen) for a newbie with a strong computer background.

Installation puked twice while extracting the last file of the stage3 tarball off of the CD-ROM. On the third attempt, I booted gentoo without cdcache support and copied the stage3 tarball from the CD-ROM to the hard disk. This time it extracted perfectly.

GRUB is installed and appears on boot, however even with what I've read about "swapping" hd0 and hd1 to trick the machine into thinking it's booting from the first disk, I still can't successfully boot to Windows. I am able to boot to Windows nicely by entering the BIOS setup and switching the boot order of the disks.

XFree86 is also installed, however the video modes and so forth are not configured yet. When that is finished I will probably attempt to install Gnome.

Also found out that my modem is not really a modem, it's a winmodem. However, it uses a Conexant chipset and luckily we have Linuxant.

Intel offers a Linux driver for my video card, an Intel 82815. It seems that this card dynamically allocates memory from the system, rather than the old method of putting the RAM directly on the card.

In all I have learned a lot here in the over the last evening (up until 2:30a) and hope to have the desktop and modem up tonight. As I said, this package has excellent instructions, but as a newbie I am still stuck on the learning curve.

I could not boot to the CD from the magazine. I also found out that the stage 1 distribution is included, which means that it is fully configurable, but probably a little too much so for my experience and use at this time.

In order to get back online, I had to switch the drives connectors and master/slave status back in order to boot the machine again.

I have downloaded the 2 CDs directly from Gentoo and will try again tonight.

Tonight I will pull my C: drive out, plug it in as my D: drive, and install an old drive from a junker computer (I think it is still around 6 GB though) and install Gentoo Linux.

I'm hoping that I can make the jump to Linux and keep my C: drive around, booting to it only if I need to use Win32 for something. There is a program called GRUB that should let me do this.

It may be a long night tonight. I got the Gentoo distribution attached to a copy of Linux Format magazine, a Linux mag from the UK. As I understand it, Gentoo is a little unique from Redhat and the others in that they distribute source that gets compiled on your machine -- which while in theory will take longer to install because you have to compile everything, the result is that the binary it generates should be optimized for your specific machine. Gentoo also has converted about 5800 software packages into this special format, making it easy for you to go to their website and DL a package source, compile it and have it running in no time. Apparently the interface to do this is slick (per Slashdot geeks).

The stability of my current setup is pissing me off. I just wiped more spyware off of it that may have been contributing, but as a user who likes 10+ applications open at once, I find that too many of the programs written for Windows leak memory, causing my system to crash because of low resources in just a few short hours of screwing around.

I will soon see how much I really depend on Windows.

I was BSing with a coworker at lunch yesterday... He said that if people in the US had to physically write a check in the amount of their annual income tax, Washington would probably be in flames. I agree with him. You don't realize how much you actually pay into this machine -- it's automatically deducted from your paycheck and maybe you'll get a refund in April.

What's disgusting is that *our* tax money is being used to fund the ongoing war activities, most recently to the tune of $87 billion! After the blackout hit this part of MI earlier this year, I heard (on NPR of course) that to completely upgrade our dated electrical infrastructure would take something right around $100 billion. This system is arguably the most vulnerable to another terrorist attack.