Saturday, November 12, 2005

Goodbye, C Drive

I managed to mess up my second machine. Updating Debian Linux was taking ages, even though I have a fast Broadband connection. The Synaptic updater was not very friendly, and kept asking hard to understand questions. I got to thinking "Fedora Core 4 Linux's updater (called yum) is far more friendly."

Then, just to prove how unfriendly it is there was some warning message about updating LILO, but it said not to answer yes if there were other Operating Systems on the PC. There are a number of others, so I said No, which apparently wasn't the right answer. After the next reboot Debian Linux was no longer working...

Now I needed another Linux Distro, preferably one a bit more up to date than Debian Linux sarge - but not as "cutting edge" as Fedora Core 4 - because of hardware limitations on my older PC.
I looked at the highly rated SUSE Linux but the hardware requirements were to heavy. I also looked at Slackware Linux but a review said it needed configuration files to be hand edited.
Finally I downloaded Ubuntu Linux 5.10.

8:00 pm
I installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 but initially it wanted to install the GRUB Boot Loader - which doesn't work with XOSL, which I use to boot between the multiple Operating Systems - Windows XP, and 3 separate instances of Windows 98 (don't ask why). Anyway, I fiddled around for a bit but couldn't get Ubuntu Linux to boot so eventually I left it for later..

Okay, to continue the saga. Now when I booted into my main Windows 98 partition it showed Drive D: as Drive E: and an unreadable FAT partition as Drive D: This unreadable FAT partition on Compaq Presario Desktop was possibly a bootable Linux partition - so deleted it with Partition Magic 8 from bootable floppy.

To be continued...

(Sorry, General, no cell phone stuff to blog about - you could have a look at Mikan Moblog or MobileBlog.)

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