OK, I give up. I'm back on Linux and there to stay, apart from a few niggles that need me to maintain a dual boot. Mandrake 9's the distro of choice this time, and I have to say it's pretty damn cool. I like. XP lives on, but it's only there now for Yahoo Messenger until Y release a linux version with webcam support. Since it's an hours travel to see my girlfriend, I'm not gonna deprive myself of seeing her face just for the sake of a clean, single OS system.

OK, I'm now back on XP. Don't get me wrong, linux is cool, I'm impressed...But it was hard work, and I couldn't be bothered. I'm still gonna set up a couple of those old Fujitsu P100ish's with Linux as command line only toys, and have them do something moderately useful (I'm thinking home control here).

One thing I will say about linux - it reminds me of the good old days when you'd stick in an obviously shafted disk, and the OS actually listens to you when you tell it to shut the fuck up complaining and just read it, OK?!? I found this out last week, when Freddy Got Fingered arrived from In-Movies with a huge crack across the radius. Put it in the DVD player, and was presented with a 'This disk is dead. Go to hell.' In more technical terms, obviously. Anyways, took it upstairs, Linux played it without moaning. Granted, it was jumpy, but it played. Gave up after about 10 mins though because linux doesn't appreciate the concept of having an MPEG decoder on your graphics card, so things were....slow. Hence the XP reinstall.

So now I'm running XP (after a trip to Sun to get the JVM - MS are only distributing it in SP1 now, and I ain't got SP1, cos I couldn't be arsed to spend an hour on the phone trying to convince MS that I'm not a pirate so I can use my product key, so it got the old faithful RHQQ2 key.

Egads! I've actually found a copy of Windows 1.01 - apparently legal too. It's living with a load of other ancient OS's at the Endangered Software Archive, and according to W2KNews, "Windows 1.01 is not available for purchase anywhere, and therefore has been treated as a free oddity."

Hmmm...wonder if it's supported :o)

OK, just made the leap...I removed XP from my last remaining MS box last night (after about 25 CD's worth of backup), and put Red Hat 7.3 on it.

Migration went well - all my MP3s seem to be in working order, and RH seems quite happy to talk to all my stuff. Now I get the fun aftermath bit where I gradually start to realise that I hadn't actually saved all my stuff on a single partition after all, and now half of it isn't there. Oh well, I'll handle that when I get there.