Weekend geek report

[mdlbear]

Nothing really earth-shaking -- another day, another Linux install. Discovered, in the course of upgrading my main workstation from a 20GB disk to a 40, that Etch really doesn't like being moved to a different partition. Probably needed to have its initrd rebuilt. If I'd had the sense to copy it to the same partition, and mark it bootable, things might have been simpler. Or else not.

The other problem with Etch is that it uses the udev daemon to manage /dev, so if you boot from a different distro you can't just chroot into it and run lilo or grub-install the way you used to. I ought to make myself a grub install disk. The good news is that I've gotten fast enough at installing Debian that it's not really worth the trouble of moving partitions anymore. The secret is a stupid little script that prints out the names of all the packages I normally install.

Also worked on installing DeMuDi on the Mini-ITX box that's going back to being the recording system now that I've almost completely silenced it. Problem is that DeMuDi is somewhere about halfway between the Sarge and Etch versions, so it seems to be a bit tricky to upgrade. I think it needs to be upgraded from an Etch (testing) archive.

Meanwhile, I'm about four boxes into packing up the junk in the office to the point where I can take down the shelves so that the (re)pipers can get at the back of the tub. That won't happen for another week at the very least, but it'll take me at least that long to get ready. It's a mess. (Getting the books off the shelves is the easy part -- it's the piles on the floor and the counter that are the hard part.) Oh, and I need to go out and buy more file boxes. A package of ten isn't nearly enough.