061228 00:16 by iDRMRSR

While Melinda was doing the laundry, I applied myself to trying out Linux on the other two boxen I have gathering dust here.

One was my newer laptop. I FINALLY found a distro, Linux Mint 2.1 (Bea not Barbara) in which a couple of simple commands got my wifi card working with ONLY THE LIVE CD in the thing! I also found a hunk of software out there somewhere that restored the functionality of my touchpad, so I could scroll by dragging my finger around it as if it were a nipple.

I never "did it" (that is, installed Linux) on a laptop before. I washed real good afterward, and nobody will be the wiser because I just used the Live CD, so there's like no trace of what I did around.

Then I got this 550MHZ P-III box in a closet. It has a WHOPPING 20GB hard drive and a 3D video card with a whole 16M onboard!!! It even has a ZIP drive (100mb) AND a DVD read only drive! Perfect vintage, I supposed, to run Linux on.

Took forever to slap Ubuntu on it, however. But it runs. Just barely. I thought it might be a little peppier than it was with just Windows ME on it (remember that turkey). You can really, really tell it's sluggish compared to a more modern machine. I was lucky to find it was new enough for the BIOS to boot from a CD.

I may screw around with it a little more and then I think it's going to go back in the closet.

Enough of that stuff for today. I'm going to think about sticking toothpicks in Kirstie for the rest of the evening and see what's playing on Eyelid Theater.