OS geekery

[mirrorshard]

I finally got tired enough of not having a proper programming environment that I decided to switch to Linux. I've now:

• Done a(n overdue) backup cycle.
  
• Discovered that Iris refuses to boot from CD. The bios sees the CD drive quite happily (in fact, she sees it twice - once by brand name and once as USB CD-ROM) but moving it up the list doesn't do anything. In fact, nothing does anything.
  
• Turned a flash drive into an Ubuntu CD. Needed to download HP Drive Key Boot Utility to put in a boot sector. Somewhat of a technological advance over the older methods, which basically involve putting a floppy in the drive (see the problem there?) and copying the boot sector from that.
  
• Grudgingly conceded that whilst KDE might not be 4Dwm or bowman, it's acceptably usable even if it refuses to understand xsetroot -solid black.
  
• Made a long list of the stuff I need to redownload and install, which I'll copy here for my own reference.
  
  • Firefox
    
  • Inkscape
    
  • Scribus
    
  • The GIMP
    
  • CD/DVD utilities, unless there's something adequate built in
    
  • Printer drivers for my HP Photosmart 2575 all-in-one. Let's hope it takes me less time than it did when I tried to make an SGI talk to the departmental HP printer. (Time to give up, in that particular case. Never did manage it.)
    
  • USB driver for my phone.
    
  • Mudclient. I've had Coldbeer recommended to me.
    
  • A code editor I'm comfortable with. It's axiomatic that emacs will do anything I need, but that doesn't mean I'll be able to make it do so.
    
• Reacquired a copy of the network key.
  

Right, now what've I forgotten... I suppose I'll find out.

Edit 1: On booting up from the flash drive, I got a bash prompt and nothing else. Ran into the same with reddragdiva the other day - booting with a CD in the drive should probably fix it, so I'm burning one now. On restarting without the flash drive, I got a Windows/Linux prompt.

Edit 2 (02:00): Nope, still didn't boot into Kubuntu from the flash drive. The same bash prompt. On picking 'Linux' from the boot menu without the flash drive in, I got a Kubuntu splash screen, a list of 'PCI: Cannot allocate resource' errors, and an ash prompt. Not even bash. Let's try it with, and see what happens.

Edit 3 (02:13): OK, that worked, though I got an error on GUI startup saying 'Could not start process Unable to create io-slave'. I suspect this is something to do with the CD drive again, since that's set up as a slave. It works, though, so I'm not too worried. And the networking works, since I'm posting from within the liveCD environment. Time to install.

Edit 4 (02:45): Installation complete! And without any io error messages this time, either. All the hardware works, it understands the laptop function keys without having to be told, I have my scrollpad, &c. Now for software downloading.