the linux saga – part I

by oBelIX

I had decided to switch to linux. So this Wednesday I decided to actually make the switch. Decided to try out Mandriva 10.0, it had got some good reviews. Now I did not feel like burning the ISO due to two major reasons

(1) My cd-r drive conked out a long time ago
(2) I did not have blank cd’s

So, what does one do??? I decided to raw copy the first cd to an empty partition and boot from it, hence issued

cat MDK-CD1.iso > /dev/hdb2

and told grub to boot from hdb2. In theory this should work but it did not. So, I figured it was a problem with “cat” and I dd’d the image onto hdb2. That also did not work.

After these initial failures (which had caused countless reboots) I gave up and asked vishnu to burn the iso. First attempt, he burned the ISO as a file to the CD-R. Second attempt it got burned correctly, except that the initial ramdisk image was the only file that was corrupt on the cd.

I thought, “Screw Mandriva. Lets repair FC4”. And then onwards I have been in FC4. This has to be the longest I have ever been in linux (not counting ssh to remote servers), its been close to 48 – 60 hours.

Anyway, Linux is good. Its faster than windows for all normal tasks like firefox, winamp etc. The only problem is the lack of a good dc++ client. That absolutely pisses me off. Valknut sucks man, Valknut sucks. After around 60 hours in linux I learned the following

(1) how to get the dumbass D-Link card to be detected and configured as a normal ethernet card.
(2) enabling global hotkeys for xmms.

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PS – MAS (MAS Absolutely Sucks) finished. Man, that paper was horrible.

PS1 – Played civilization 4. It actually sucks. However, its playable. As a long time fan of the series I’d say that they screwed up the gameplay.

PS2 – We have to do a BTP instead of a FYP.

PS3 – I’m pretty darn bored

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