10:24 PM

I finally had had enough of trying to get Linux to work on 6-year old equipment. The problems I’d been having with Arbonne were the last straw. So, last weekend I went out (with Merrystar’s encouragement) and got a Powerbook (17-inch) and couldn’t be happier with it.

Of course, my network decided to retaliate against the interloper:

• My POS replacement wireless router (D-Link DI-524, which I do not recommend) stopped talking to the cable modem. Hours wasted with hard resets and reprogramming and more hard resets finally resulted in a working internet connection.

• I rebooted Arbonne to restore her wireless connection - yes, I know that you shouldn’t have to reboot a Linux box, but this is the only thing that worked to solve whatever Netgear MA301 - DI-524 wierdness was going on - and she lost her boot loader on the reboot. Four days later, with numerous attempts at installing from the same CDs that would work on Tsiolkovsky, I dragged her upstairs and did a network install of SuSE 10.0.

• Tsiolkovsky’s upgrade? Not so good. Installer barfed in the middle and the computer was down for a frantic 24 hours as I tried to restore the bootloader so Merrystar could use the Windows partition.

• While playing around with the bluetooth on the Powerbook, I wiped my phone’s address book clean. Oops.

That was last weekend, which I am never doing again. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Anyhow:

• Tsiolkovsky has been upgraded from RHEL 3.0 to SuSE 10.0 OSS. USB now works, though the wireless and automounter are still flaky. The Windows partition is now readable in Linux, which is a huge improvement.

• Arbonne has been converted into a headless server (no monitor, no desktop manager, no graphical environment) and has been renamed Lórien accordingly. Lórien is running SuSE 10.0 OSS, and her network problems continue - I couldn’t get the D-Link G card working at all, and the MA301 continues to fight with the wireless router. Also, I misbought a second 250GB drive, so I’m still running the 40GB drive for /. and the 250GB for /data. Oh, and I can’t access the internet from her for more than 10 seconds after boot with the wireless card. Grumble.

• Hithlum is my new Powerbook. She’s purty. I had originally named her Hísilómë, but all the accents didn’t translate well in the scripts and shells.

• My phone address updated flawlessly once I imported my contacts from Outlook to Address Book.app.

• Tigana remains as she ever has, running Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.3. She slept through the whole debacle.