Wednesday, August 25, 2004

And in related news...

In an effort to get things more pleasant to bike at home, at night, I thought I'd try to revive my old 400MHz laptop to watch AVIs on. To do so, I pulled down the ISO for SuSE 9.1, and installed it last night. What a great experience!

I've got to say that it's been many years since I've (re)installed Windows on a machine, and that would have probably been WinME as well, but I was very impressed with how easy SuSE went on. I should also say that I've installed LFS and Gentoo in recent years, and have enjoyed the experience of both, but both were do-it-yourself undertakings, at least to some extent, and I was interested in just having a more managed experience.

And there really isn't much to tell about what happened. I booted, filled out a few boxes, decided to go with KDE (which was the default), told it to do whatever it wanted to with the disk partitioning, and clicked Start. A couple hours later it was finished, and it had properly detected all of my hardware, with the exception of my PCMCIA NIC.

Now the bad news. Turns out that my laptop is experiencing some hardware difficulties, and the video card is well on its way to being deceased. Bummer, but I'd had problems with it before, so not too much of a surprise. Ah, well. Time to start saving up for a new box of some kind. With my laptop now following my Palm Pilot, I'm about finished with portable devices for now.

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