The Itch

I was getting the same familiar itch again. I just had to do it. I had an unused installer amongst my cd's. It was an installer for Yoper (Your Operating System). It's a linux variant that was built from the ground up. It's not descended from anything, as far as I can tell. I was convinced I wanted to try it after reading some of the posts in it's online support forums.

Well, it didn't go too well. See,on the previous installs I've done I did not have any problems configuring my monitor. On Bayanihan, I just chose the generic option. On Mandrake, Ubuntu and Xandros the monitor worked with the default settings just fine. Xandros was extra easy, because it already had nVidia drivers bundled with its installer. On Yoper however, the generic setting was not working. It would give me an error that I chose the wrong setting. I tried picking a CRT model and brand that was different from mine, but no go. So after failing to do anything, I just popped in the Damn Small Linux (DSL) cd and tried doing the hard-drive install. It was after I finished that I realized it would be more flexible to just use the live cd.

Then I was back where I started. I just re-installed Xandros on the partition and started rebuilding the repository list. Then something happened. The electricity died. Another random brownout that seemed to plague us more and more recently. The electricity was back after about a 5-minute outage. I had lost my ardor by then. What a waste of time.

My next project? I'm trying to get a copy of CentOS and probably test that. Since its for servers, I'm convincing my wife to borrow an old PC her mom owns. I could probably use that to learn how servers (at least the linux ones) work. Another things I want to do is discover how to clone hard drives using open source software. A lot of debates in different forums out there about which program works best. I might go with Knoppix and a program packaged with it called 'partimage' that clones partitions. Knoppix is a live cd, so I could use it without installing, plus it has the regular stuff most linux distros come with. By regular, I mean they come with an office suite, cd/dvd burning software, image manipulation programs and software to connect to the internet. That's it for now. Ciao.