David @ Tokyo

Well, it seems like I'm a bigger geek than I thought. I have just finished installing Debian Sarge on to my laptop using the "daily build" (doesn't that sound like I am a guinea pig - who would have thought!), and have installed the x-window-system, enlightenment, mozilla-firefox packages, enabling me to type all this from Mozilla Firefox 1.0 running on Debian, not Windows XP for the first time ever.

Still lots of stuff to figure out how to do; substitutes for programs I use in Windows (one example is the client software that I always use to upload pictures to this blog - so I won't have any screenshots up for a while), got to try using all my various hardware with Linux (got a firewire hard drive, MiniSD card USB device (supposedly designed for Windows XP only), plus my USB mouse... not that I ever use it... hmmm, can't think of anything else. Oh yeah, I have a USB vid cam too. I never use that either, no one out there with broadband to talk to me!

The new Debian installer is supposed to be lots easier than the old one, but I couldn't really see the difference, it just seemed to be all reorganized. I guess I am used to the complicated one now. The scary step was partitioning. First it used some symbols to describe the partition layout, which I couldn't understand. I found my way into a submenu that explained it all though. But it had decided to make the partition with Linux on it the only bootable partition. "What about Windows XP?" I thought - when I shrunk NTFS yesterday it told me very explicitly to make sure to re-set the bootable flag when recreating the NTFS partition - and now it was gone. But with my backups all safely taken, I trusted it, and sure enough in the next step (Grub installer) the existing Windows XP installation was detected, and ultimately all was setup correctly. I've always used the LILO boot loader until now, so I guess I wouldn't have been so anxious if I was familiar with Grub.

Anyway, all is well, and Enlightenment 16.6 is super fast on this newer machine (Processor is 1.066 Ghz Celeron versus the old Pentium 166Mhz, and 256M of RAM as opposed to 32).

Going to call home to Mum in New Zealand soon. She will probably get sick of me writing all this mumbo-jumbo techo crap on here! But it's my blog :-)