12:47 AM

Sometimes, I amaze myself with my stupidity. It masquerades as stubbornness, but really it’s stupidity.

See, to celebrate all my recent work in my garden I decided to see if my computer kung-fu had improved any and try to get Tigana back in tip-top shape. For those following allong at home, she had the following problems:

• Installing any windows update causes a catastophic OS crash, requiring hours of reinstalling DLLs to fix.
• The left mouse button no longer works, so we use a small optical USB mouse now. However, Red Hat 7.2 doesn’t support USB mice.
• The wireless card works normally under Windows, and can work under Red Hat, but not with WEP enabled.
• Any recent Linux installation (Red Hat 9, Fedora X, even Slackware 10) runs into problems with the PCMIA CD-ROM drive on the 505TR. The web advice (assigning an ide2 value) hasn’t worked.
• The ‘T’ key is loose and comes off every once in a while.

So, because I’m an idiot, I though I should spend some time actually trying to *fix* these problems. Stupid, stubborn, idiot. I decided to tackle the problems one at a time, first reinstalling the Windows partition. This did not go well. Not that it went poorly, but it took about 4 hours all told, and then before I connected to the internet I reinstalled Norton Personal Firewall.

NPF worked for all of one boot before an error dialog kindly informed me that my security settings were all FUBARed and I should reinstall the software. I did so. Twice. Thrice. Five times I reinstalled that software, eventually deleting every Symantec-related file I could find.

No luck.

So here I am, stuck without a firewall on an unpatched win2k box. I know that there’s no way I can patch it fast enough before it’s compromised. So I turn to my old nemesis, ZoneAlarm. I download it quickly, turn off the wireless card, and get it set up and running. So far, so good.

Then I notice that the USB mouse - you know, the one that’s required to make the damn machine work - is flaking out and freezing up. The touchpad still works fine, but not the external mouse.

While I’m running Windows Update I check it out on the web, and sure enough other people have had problems with ZoneAlarm causing USB weirdness. I don’t know which I’m more pissed off at now - ZoneAlarm, for making such an intrusive program, or Microsoft, who shipped Win2K without a firewall. It’s perhaps the only benefit I see to running Windows XP.

So now I’m presented with a dilemma; firewall and flaky mouse, or no firewall, insecure box, but a working mouse. These are not the sort of choices I like to make. So I turn to the Linux side to see if maybe I can salvage some shreds of adminisrative dignity. (The smart admin would have gone outside and built another garden bed. I’m not so smart.)

The WEP appears to not work because the Wireless Exensions package is version 11, and I need version 15. That appears at least fixable, with a little research. The USB problem likely requires rebuilding the kernel, which I don’t have the source code for. But I remain hopeful that if I can upgrade the distro, it’ll all work out.

Of course, every disro I tried - with the exception of Red Hat 7.2, which is already on Tigana - failed to load the proper CD-ROM driver and barfed the install. Some of them (Fedora, cough, cough) spewed code all over the screen before I terminated Anaconda. Others just sat there and waited… and waited… and waited…

Got old, quick.

All the while I’m lusting after Tsiolkovsky, happily playing DVDs right next to me in bed. Is that wrong?

Dealing with computers is so unsatisfying.