Boleman and Friends: The Blag

    About 2 weeks ago I was at the Baylor Bookstore and I saw that they were selling Business Premium versions of Vista for $10, due to student volume licensing.  So I did what any adventurous individual would do, install on the slowest windows-compatible machine you have lying around and bitch and whine to everyone about how piss poor and memory hogging the whole OS is. The computer I put Vista on was a 1.9GHz P4, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB with a 120GB HD, top of the line only 3 years ago. I installed it, thereby turning my old XP-Pro Partition into a windows.old folder on the c:/, which I appriciated(some folks don’t back-up data before installing a new OS). So 2 hours later, I get a little restless since most of the apps were running in bullettime; even when idle the computer was churning at 15% capacity. Don’t even get me started on running HL2 on Vista.
    After talking to my good chum Cody, I decided to format the whole HD and just go back to my old home, Linux. I’ve been a Red Hat/Fedora kid since RH5, so seeing Fedora 6 available just blew my mind.(The last release I used was FC4-test2)  I downloaded the torrent of FC6 and burnt the 5 CDs required. The CDs finalized, the HD was wiped, the packages were selected and the installation began. I was pretty content at the speed on the install, considering that Vista took 2.5 hours seeing FC churn nicely was a good sight. At around 5:23 AM I realized that the installation was frozen, Disc 5 was corrupted. So I did the honorable thing and screamed bloody murder at my computer while invoking Cthulhu and Poppin’ Fresh. I slept the anger away and started the next day by redownloading the .iso for disc 5 and MD5 checking it. The installation went great, I got it all to work, except for my WiFi adapter. Linux doesn’t like Linksys adapters, well not natively(Damn You ORINOCO!!!!)
    I spotted a forum on a Wi-Fi on Linux site that talked about ubuntu’s better Wi-Fi system, so I jumped over to ubuntu, and that was a chore. I’m used to Fedora’s slick interface that they ripped off of RH. 45 mins later, I installed the whole OS, rebooted and the HD wasn’t recognized.

Moral of the Story: I should of dual booted WinXP-Pro and FC when I was a youngin’.

Filed under: Quickly Posted