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Ubuntu 7.10 to PCLinuxOS 2008

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I started a new project at a client's office a month or so ago. On the first day I turned up, and managed to work for about an hour, before my laptop died. Somewhat embarassing. I tried for about an hour to resuscitate it, but couldn't get it to boot at all: it just died and froze before the KDE login screen. It seemed to be some sort of graphical mishap, and no amount of fiddling with xorg.conf from rescue mode would fix it.

I excused myself, went back home and after some more fiddling, decided to backup and re-install. Having made this decision I was looking through my pile of install CDs, and I came across PCLinuxOS 2008, which I'd downloaded a few weeks previously, and I'd been meaning to try out. "So why not try it out on this laptop?" said the evil part of my brain — the same part which forces me to spend time on Facebook instead of working.

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Swimming Through Treacle

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Treacle

The more astute readers will notice that its been over a month since I posted anything. Clearly the blogging apathy has hit, which any blogger will recognise as something which happens once the lustre of your shiny new blog begins to dull. But there are more sinister forces at work. I fear I may have been infected by the Philippines Treacle Syndrome.

This deadly wasting disease is most prominent on a Friday afternoon. It causes ordinary tasks to take several times longer than they usually should. Here are some examples:

Buying Ibuprofen in Mercury Drug:

You walk into the store. There are 6 staff in the shop, and 2 customers. You stride to the counter, behind which are 4 of the staff. They instantly stare intently at pieces of paper in front of them. Some try to run out the back door. Some duck under the counter. Eventually one will have to talk to you …

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More Power

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We're getting into summer in the Philippines, and I was just worrying how hot my Thinkpad R51e was running. Its 32 degrees in the room, and my CPU is running at a consistent 73 degrees, according to cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature which seems a bit unhealthy. My motherboard fried itself twice last year, and I figure that … Read more

Thunderbird Calendar Rearrangement

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There are some tasks which are just right for Friday afternoon. I've got a to-do list with a number of urgent items on it, but none of them seem very appealing on a Friday afternoon. Especially when there's a holiday Monday coming up. So of course I not only chose a non-essential item to spend my energies on this afternoon; I chose one which wasn't even on my to-do list.

My calendar in Thunderbird has been bothering me lately. I like to keep all my appointments in it from when I first started using an electronic diary, which is now quite a few years' worth. This makes Thunderbird very unhappy, as it struggles to index and display all the events every time you use the Add-in Calendar (Lightning). Chug chug chug.

And there's another problem. I have an online synchronising service, the excellent Scheduleworld (http://www.scheduleworld.com/) with which I synchronise regularly. While it normally only syncs the events which have changed, Thunderbird will occasionally decide that it really must sync Everything, which it subsequently does. This takes it about 15 minutes, during which time I can't do much with my computer.

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Big Switch 7: Shake your Booty

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OK, in the last post, I had moved my partitions around substantially, so we were obviously in for a few problems booting. To recap, the new layout looks like this:

  • /dev/hda1 – 20Gb – Linux main system (moved and enlarged)
  • /dev/hda2 – 100Mb – /boot partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda4 – 1 Gb – swap partition (moved)
  • /dev/hda3 – Extended partition containing
    • /dev/hda5 – 17 Gb Data partition (enlarged)
    • /dev/hda6 – 17Gb /home partition (newly created to house all the VMs)

The first problem was getting the thing to boot up. The MBR was still on the boot sector of the drive, but it was telling the computer to boot from the wrong sector. I pulled out the Mint / Ubuntu install CD and booted from that.

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