There are times in my life where I make decisions I regret, and there are times I make decisions which I do not regret. Installing Linux is one of the latter.

Last week, my computer committed suicide. Windows curled up it's toes, taking 600 vital files with it. While I appreciate Windows realising it's not worthy of living, it was a rather tedious event, and one that left me freaking out. Not because of the loss of Windows, but because of the 5 month gap between making a CD of the files, and now.

"While I appreciate Windows realising it's not worthy of living..."

So, once I realised what Windows had done (started out as a normal crash, but somehow wiped everything down to the letter 'S' in the main Windows directory), I resigned myself to a long night restoring the system. Ran the worthless piece of junk Scandisk and discovered a fundamentally destroyed Windows directory. Fixed that, then tried to reboot into Windows. LiLo choked. Uh-oh! Tried again, this time it booted (not sure what happened there). Of course, Windows wouldn't load, claiming that there was a fatal IO error, but of course, as is Windows way, it gave me no indication as to WHY, it just wouldn't work!

This was where the first problem set in. My CD of all the vital Windows files was in a format that supports long filenames. As we all know, DOS doesn't do this. While I think that the 8.3 forces concise naming conventions, it's a pain in the rear end in a situation like this. I HAD to get Windows booting and to a GUI just so I could READ the damn CD. Tried booting in the inappropriately named "Safe Mode". (Safe for the system, or you?) Dead, nada, not a brazz wazoo (Where do you get, actually get brass wazoo's?).

I was just about resigned to my fate, a fate of reinstalling everything, losing all my email addresses, ICQ info etc... when it hit me. I have Linux. Linux is a superior OS. A Windows crash means nothing to Linux. It took a few seconds, then the realisation hit me... I praised my luck at having 2 OS's installed, and went and said hello to the man in the red hat. Quick login as 'root', into X Windows to use the wonderful program Filerunner (available at a Linux site near you), cleared out the .chk files that Scandisk had left behind, all 500 of them, and then accessed my CDR drive (that I have mount at bootup) and copied the files over from there to the 'C:\Windows' directory. When I was done, I quit, rebooted, got to Windows, had to reboot (registry error, puh-lease, the piece of junk is one big error) then that was it. Windows was back!

I know saving Windows from Linux is probably tantamount to heresy, but it was very nice to have that ability. Were it not for Linux I'd have lost EVERYTHING on my Windows drive. While Windows itself would be no sad loss (though with the damn Winmodem, realistically it would be unfortunately) all my contact info, graphics, mp3's etc... that I have on the hard drive would be. So Linux had saved me from a very painful few hours reinstalling Windows!

Thanks to someone I met through this column (Hi Greg!) I should be getting a CD of Red Hat 6 soon, so you can expect this diary to be updated with relevant stuff once I get the CD and get it installed. Still haven't solved the "normal user" writing to the DOS drive problem yet, so I'm still open to suggestions there (though I have one thing I haven't tried yet). So anyway, RH6 should be on it's way soon, then I can join the CURRENT version of Linux. This is the main reason I haven't done much lately, I can't see the point of going to all the trouble with my current installation when i'm just going to reformat and be done with it and start again.

Installed the venerable UAE in Linux a week or so ago. Not much luck. I want it for 1 reason, and 1 reason only, and that reason is to run the awesome program Headquarters, the Amiga rendition of the boardgame Battletech. Neither Linux nor DOS/Windows has a version of this game for it. There was a semi reasonable version in the works for Windows, but the guy never finished it (lazy swine). So anyway, I installed, hunted out a ROM image (I've owned 5 Amiga's in my time, so I figure I'm allowed to download the ROM from the net. They've had a LOT of my money.), and then the software. Run the software, it crashes. Got it working, but as soon as there is any sound in the game, UAE crashes and locks up, end of story. If anyone knows of a decent Battletech game for either Linux or DOS/Windows (preferably Linux) please let me know.

Spent the better part of a week downloading the ISO of the new Linux Mandrake release. Having read up on it it sounds awesome. Downloaded the ISO, ran 'md5sum' to check its integrity, a big fat failure. Tried downloading it on my connection at work (600 megs downloaded in under 3 hours. Nice :) ) Tested it... failed. I've written to Mandrake and asked if they know of a zipped version or something, as I can't afford to buy it (a place here in Canada is selling it for $7.50 and I can't afford it). I hope I hear from them, as it seems like a pretty good distro.

Regardless, within a week or 2, I should be on a nice new 2.2.* kernel system. First thing I will try and do is recompile the kernel for the Pentium... We'll see how it goes...

Until next time, keep hugging the penguin...