Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to angharads_house!!! Have a great one!!

This is just plain loathsome...

... in a really good way: Cthuugle.com.

(From this post by tibicina.)

Upgrading Argo

I've been spending some time this afternoon upgrading my Thinkpad T21, which I purchased several years ago at a surplus joint. One of my coworkers handed me a 60GB hard drive (removed from an upgraded laptop) that was flaky in his machine at home. We'll see. Replacing a drive on an IBM laptop is a cakewalk.

The install disk for the current Ubuntu, 7.10, boots but does something horrible to the display, making it basically uninstallable. Debian Etch does the same horrible thing, but at least it gets installed so you can flip the driver over to vesa, which is where I had it before. My alternate disk for 7.10 had an error on it, but I also downloaded Hardy alpha 5. That worked perfectly, and is currently installing.

I tried both my WiFi cards; neither worked. Hopefully a suitable driver will fix it. One of them (the 802-11g, oddly enough) actually recognized the network, but kept insisting on a password and wouldn't connect. It's an open network, damnit. Or do I have to kick the router? (9:08 that did it! Just fscking worked. I could really get to love Ubuntu.) (9:32 Still some flakiness -- unclear whether bugs or bad drive. Current thinking favors bugs.)

It's also an open question whether any of the usual laptop features will be recognized out of the box; Etch wouldn't even suspend properly.

Finally, I still have to copy over the old Windows 98SE partition; that will require a USB adapter and searching for the driver disk. The machine is going to a non-geek who's used to Windows; whether I can persuade her to switch over is an open question, so it's important to leave both options open. Hopefully I'll be able to do that with the partition manager once I find a USB enclosure to plop the old drive into.