A day of Linux

Didn’t wake up until about midday today*, I think I must have been up late last night. I’ve spent most of the day switching between talking to relatives and trying to install Debian on Frell, my main PC.

I didn’t get very far with the installation as I’ve been trying to find places to stuff my backup all day. I tar’ed up a load of mp3s and tried to upload them to reubs’ Knoppix box but it ran out of hard disk space. Kept running though, which Windows wouldn’t have done!

asher_francis re-installed Windows XP and has started learning to program VB which is cool. Until he breaks something.

Talking of breaking things, I’ve just spent the past half an hour trying to get tralk to boot back into X. I downloaded mchicago‘s java client for DeepDown and tried to run it and suddenly X died on me. At this point I started cursing at mchicago which i should apologise for as it’s pretty unlikely the java client actually caused the crash!

He fiddled with tralk for a while for me but to no avail. It was trying to start KDE by default and there was an error in the configuration which I couldn’t pinpoint. I wanted to start fluxbox which works. Then I started trying to get to xdm or gdm so I could select which window manager to use as there didn’t seem to be a script to start fluxbox that should be there. At that point something VERY odd happened – I got xdm and gdm running simultaneously on the same screen overlapping each other and it was NOT pretty. The cursor just didn’t know where to go…

I got back to a shell and killed about a dozen instances of kdeinit manually along with xdm and gdm. Then I ran gdm and logged into fluxbox, phew.

Serves me right for running X on my web server really. But I was booted into Windows on Frell to copy backup files to my mp3player hard disk at the time and needed a Linux box.

I’m going to Laura’s tomorrow after I’ve installed debian. I am determined to actually get there which means I need to get my ass moving and get up at a decent time to start bodging through the installation. Somehow I have to sort out my 6 partitions across 2 hard disks into something more sane!

*I should explain that if it’s around 1 or 2 am and I say “today” what I really mean is “yesterday”.

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