Woo! Computer!

Mom bought me an 80 gig hard drive today. And I is so happy. It's taken me several hours, but I've finally got it all worked out. I now officially have a ~50 gig expansion to my 19 gigs of space, and another ~25 of which I am going to partition Linux onto. Frankly, actually installing the hard drive as a slave in the hardware sense wasn't that hard. It took me maybe 5 minutes to plug it in, another minute to realize that I might need some IDE cable, 20 to go back to the campus tech store and get some (free of charge, those nice people) and come back, 1 minute to realize that I didn't actually need said extra cable, then half a minute to close the whole thing up and boot up. Of course, it's taken me the last 2 and half hours to figure out exactly how to get the drive to be recognized. I had to fdisk, which wasn't too hard to find info on, except that the fdisk on my cd wouldn't recognize the entire hard drive, only like 10 gigs of it, so I ended up making a start up floppy and using that.

And now, I run a thorough scan disk until I can't wait for it to finish any longer, stop it, then try to install linux. Yay! I can crash my own linux machine now instead of crashing the linux mail server at school trying to run my programs.

No wonder why people hate Linux.

Crikey on a stick, but that freaking sucked! Ugh, the stupid mandrake linux installer I got from Dr. Scott was supposed to have made things easy. And Russ told me how simple it was. What a damn liar. Honestly. Okay, so some things weren't too hard, but some are completely impossible. For one thing, I haven't the foggiest how the hell to get it to figure out how to connect to the net. You can't just pick a wireless card from a list or anything. But I can circumvent that. But then, I keep testing my graphic stuff, and it never passed the test. But I just said screw it, because none of the options fixed it. And when it's all done installing (at least I figured out how to make windows the default boot), I find that it doesn't boot to the graphical type of thing. I mean, I come to a prompt that makes me log in. And haven't the foggiest clue in hell how to go from the command prompt to something like the KDE interface or whatever the graphical interface is called. All that sucks beyond the telling of it towards actually getting any work done on it. And to top it off, apparently by having linux recognize my printer, it stopped Windows from recognizing it. Now I have to track down the disk for my printer if I ever want to print from it. Oh joy of joys. I'd try to fix it tomorrow, but the power guy is supposed to come over tomorrow to install the extra powerage that my dad needs for his shop, so the power should be out for up to like 8 hours at the most. *faceplant*