Memorial Day. I'm glad it was Memorial Day, since I have no memory of it...

OK, losing a day here and there, acceptable, if annoying. Two? Jesu Christo...

9:15 PM OK, one of these days, I am actually going to get caught up.

And Judge Jackson is going to rule in favor of Microsoft, too.

I've spent the last several days in head-down, get-out-of-my-way mode. I did get a lot done, but I don't remember much of it, I'm still not caught up, and I have no idea how I'm going to get there. This is a Bad Thing.

There has been progress made, yes. First of all, I'm typing this in my living room, in my favorite chair, on a IBM ThinkPad 570E. Very nice, I highly recommend getting someone to buy one of these for you if you need a laptop.

Too bad it isn't mine; that's still lost in reams of paperwork. God knows when we'll get THAT straightened out. I shanghaid this one off the pile when it was supposed to be sent back to the central office; the person who had it before (our Office Manager) had been slated to have it replaced with a workstation (a Rambus-based IBM IntelliStation M 733 MHz) - but for some reason, it makes more sense to send this perfectly good, barely-used laptop to the storage facility and make me wait (at least) a week to get one exactly like it.

I think not.

Let's all hope common sense breaks out and I don't have to send this one back.

I'm maintaining systems, including network printers and fax servers, on someone else's network. I don't have my own NT domain available; the PDC is in San Mateo, California. Some of the people in San Mateo need a geography lesson; Tempe is a suburb of Phoenix, which is in ARIZONA. Not California. Not Nevada. Arizona. Say it with me. ARIZONA.

Sigh. I'm way behind on Bob's book; I've got it more-or-less completed, but I need to find time to type it up and send it in. Mmmm. Tomorrow. Promise. Maybe tonight, if I get enough of the rest of this done.

On second thought, tomorrow.

So why am I doing this instead of something productive? Because I've been doing that, and now I wish to relax a bit with my virtual friends. How are all my virtual friends?

Fun, interesting and useful link for all you Perl hackers; PerlMonks.com Come by and say hello; you'll like it. This site has saved my sanity several times over the last couple of days.

Day messily devoured by a complete, massive YAW2K/LI.

2:00 PM I made it. I'm back online.

That's really quite a feat. My laptop died yesterday morning - complete hardrive wipe - and I'm only now back online.

The reason? Well, uh, er, you see... <SEG>

Yup, that's right, I screwed the pooch. More or less.

You see, I need (in order to do my job) both Linux and Windows. Pretty much at any time, in multiple locations. Therefore, I have a laptop, but I don't have two laptops. Obviously, we need to then dual-boot that laptop in order to meet both requirements. Simple enough, right? Assuming it can handle it.

It can handle it. I never posted the exact specs, so here's the short version; IBM ThinkPad 570E, PentiumIII 500, 380 MB of RAM, 8x DVD, 12 GB hard drive. The main unit weighs 4 pounds with a battery, the floppy drive and DVD are in external bays or can be attached to a "smartbase" that I don't have yet. A nice machine, more than capable of dual-booting.

One problem; it has NT4 workstation. We don't want that; we want 2000. Why? Mainly flexibility; with NT4, I can administrate NT4 machines, whereas with W2K I can manage NT4 and W2K systems. Also, under NT the DVD runs poorly (and the machine has to be booted into a special hardware profile to work at all), the USB doesn't work, the video is only so-so, and the modem only works IF the DVD isn't attached. Under Win2k, it all works, flawlessly so far as I have been able to discover, and I can attach or detach the DVD at will. The video is a clean, crisp 1024 x 768 (on a 14" TFT LCD) at 24-bit TrueColor, the USB works, and all is right with the world.

Until I went to install Linux.

Here's where I screwed up. I can only plead temporary insanity on top of my normal condition. Because of the odd situation of no-bootable-CD and Win2K not recognizing the drive even with the maually-loaded drivers, I wound up with Win2k on D:. C: (which had originally had NT, but couldn't be changed since setup was started from inside NT) was a 2 GB partition, FAT formatted, with the intention of being able to share data between Win2k and Linux.

Anybody guess what I did next?

I copied the Mandrake 7.02 cd to C:, put in my Linux boot disk, and started the installation. When I partitioned the drive, I filled the remaining space at the back of the drive. There was just one problem.

That partition was set up by Win2k Setup. When it created the partition, at the size I specified, it created an extended partition that filled the remaining space on the drive and created a logical drive at the size I specified. When I repartitioned for Linux, I was apparently too tired to notice what I was doing, and resized the partition.

Ooops. You can't do that.

Ten minutes later the drive was gone. Completely, save for the 2 GB C: partition, which did me no good as all it had on it was the Mandrake CD. My attempts to recover from the situation promptly solved that little problem - the drive was now completely empty.

I should have restored the partition table, the next morning, rather than trying to fix it at midnight. Ah well. Ain't hndsight (and sleep) grand?

The next morning, I wasted a little time trying to bring it all back, but it was way too late. No good. Nada.

So, time to start over. Do it right this time. You betcha.

Anybody remember what I said about the DVD not being bootable? You have load an OS, load PCMCIA drivers, then load IBM's PCMCIA-to-SCSI-to-IDE drivers. Hmmm. Tricky.

I finally found instructions on IBM's site. They were there, just not very easy to find. With some help from IBM support (thanks Jeff!) I was able to find it. OK, all I need to do is boot off a Windows 98 boot disk, partition the drive, format it, and run setup from there, using the DOS IBM drivers for the DVD. Simple. If you have a Windows 98 machine or boot disk handy. I didn't. The only other office in our executive-suites temporary building is a Mac shop, and we're NT/Unix.

Thanks to a quick assist from Dan Seto, that problem was taken care of. Now to partition the drive. Wait - how best to avoid the problems of last night? Well, let's do the entire partition structure for Windows. Don't let setup touch it.

So after about an hour playing with the IBM driver (not the simplest thing in the world, but not bad) I was able to boot the laptop, and see the DVD. I partition the hard drive with a 5 GB C:, and a 2 GB extended partition that became D:. FDISK complained mightily about leaving 5 GB of blank space, but I was firm.

From there, the Windows 2000 Profesional installation proceeded normally, but slowly; the Windows 98 boot disk didn't enable Smartdrive, and I didn't have the driver available anyway, so the initial file copying was incredibly slow. But it did install, and where I wanted it, too.

I got everything working in Windows; modem, DVD, floppy, sound, video, Power Management. OK. Format D: as FAT and copy Mandrake on to it. Reboot with Linux boot disk, start the install. Pay close attention to the DiskDrake screens, this time! But everything went as expected; no trouble. Reboot after writing the new partition table, and DiskDrake shows the distribution I wanted. Whew. Complete the installation (Low security, graphical desktop, please - Enlightenment, by choice. LILO? Hmmm. Well, the web site says it's possible; what the hell. (I was obviously tired again; this was about 11:00 PM last night.) Fortunately, it worked; this machine by default boots through LILO to Windows, which works perfectly, or through the alternat boot image, Linux, to Mandrake. Both work perfectly.

I'm not done yet; Windows 2000, being the OS I needed first, is now more or less complete; I even have WinAmp playing an abbreviated selection of our music. That was fun, btw - SSH'd to our gateway, SMBCLIENT \\ANYA\MUSIC from there, copy a few files up from Keri's machine to the gateway, than sftp them to here.) Linux still needs work; networking doesn't work yet, although XWindows does; the modem also works. The only things that don't are the DVD, networking, and Sound - and according to the websites, sound and networking are doable, if not easy. We shall see, probably tomorrow.

And now I'm going to TRY to get some work done. Later, all.