Fri Jan 18 06:07:07 PST 2008

My laptop hard drive started giving scary errors a couple days ago on the way to work (I've got a 90-minute commute by public transit [uck] so I fill the time by reading, listening to podcasts, or working on Project U-13). Fortunately, working at a university means that there are two computer stores on campus. I ran out at lunch, picked up a 100GB drive, and had things back to normal by the next morning.

Well, normal modulo one false start with Debian; I decided to try encrypted filesystems just for fun. But then I suspended, came back with a newere kernel, and it could not read the encrypted LVM group anymore. Whoops.

Still lots of free space on this thing, and I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu, FreeBSD and maybe NetBSD just for fun. Of course, I've got to do it all via PXE since this thing doesn't have any CDROM drive, but that just adds to the geek points.

Project U-13 is coming up on 0.0.3, btw; Andy suggested adding Rackmonkey, which looks quite cool. There's no package for it, so I'm having to do some rather ugly scripted installation…but I can stand it for now. And I've got the barest skeleton of a cfengine file in there too. Watch the skies!

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Comment from John Burton
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:39:05 -0800

Need a (an?) USB CDRom drive?  I think I might even have a USB burner
kicking around here, somewhere.

Just in case PXE kicks your butt (or there's already a PXE proxy in your
subnet, which can cause "issews..."

Comment from John Burton
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:42:06 -0800

Oh, and Ubuntu 7.10?  Hot.  Seriously.  I haven't seen it fail yet when
it comes to recognizing hardware (even demento wifi or sata
controllers).

Oh, and does Compiz nicely, so you can get pretty things to happen
onscreen that'll make your busmates go "What *is* that you're running?"

Comment from Saint Aardvark the Carpeted  +
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:47:38 -0800

Thanks, but I'm good.  Besides, PXE is far more L33t. :-)