John October 31st, 2009
In his right arm–in the crook of his elbow, pressed against his side, legs dangling–he held a toddler.
John October 24th, 2009
The C: drive on the old computer is completely toast. Any time I tried to boot it it reported a disk read error–it couldn’t even get far enough into the booting process to offer the option of booting into Safe Mode, and the drive also wasn’t responsive enough to allow reformatting it and making a clean install.
I took the old C drive out and moved the D down the cable, removing that tiny plastic rectangle making it the secondary internal drive (I just can’t get into that whole “master” and “slave” terminology), then reformatted the drive and reinstalled Win2000.
After that I changed my mind and decided I’d send it out with Ubuntu on it (I’m giving the computer to a local school to use for parts in their tech classes), but the Ubuntu disc kept taking me to the login screen without any install options. I poked around a bit, tried various options, and finally gave up without finding how to install Ubuntu from the CD I’d burnt. I’d expected the installation to be intuitively obvious, not forgetting my last experience with Linux so much as hoping that it was no longer representative: I’d heard many good things about Ubuntu, especially about how user-friendly it was.
Maybe the actual UI in Ubuntu is a big improvement over the typical Linux interface (at least for people who don’t build their own boxes and “sudo make me a sandwich”), but the installation process is actually harder than it was for me with Caldera Linux way back in 2001.