Computers behold me with contempt. All my hours of experience with DOS, those cranky years with Windows and my recent journey into the realm of Linux…. it all boils down to this ….

Computers never lie

Dummy

Dummy

Dummy

So there it is white on black; click to enlarge the image if you just can’t believe it. I must say playing with computers never has been dull. Brain exploding, frustratingly time wasteful, but never dull! Thus my Ubuntu 10.4 load didn’t survive our annual New Year “Let’s see if we can do this” marathon.  I have been set down, back in my place, firmly, beaten, but uncowed.  (Unbeknown to my arch enemy I have stealthily nudged a partition over and begun to install pure Debian with Xfce.  We shall see who wins the next round.)

Edited to add: The terrific guys at the Ubuntu forums let me know this, as usual, can be caused by many things.

1. a missing of problematic ata drive
2. a broken MBR
3. a dropped or damaged HD

1. funny how we missed the ata notification. I guess we never made it past the DUMMY!
2. hmmm could be, since the boot hangs and DUMMY! you did things you shouldn’t have even contemplated!
3. Oh no please not door number #3 I can’t handle the thought of door #3. hHey, DUMMY are your backups up to date?

. . . the Penguins stole my sanity . . . but happily I have a lovely Linux box of the Ubuntu flavour. Last summer Steve reached the, “I’ve had it with W$XP”. He purchased a heavy-duty and now hard-working Mac. This left me with no CS2 software for my W2K machine. I suppose I could have dug up some replacement software, but being faced with no further support for my T&T W2K, having buckets of old PC cards and drives (and feeling that the newer versions of W$ were evil,) — I decided to make the jump to Linux with Ubuntu.

Gulp, leaving my geekly safety net behind at a major Mac/Linux divide . . .mind numbingly terrifying! So I stripped down my box, eliminated excess W$ software, rounded up spare drives and practised the mantra, “Google is my friend, Google is my friend!” The Ubuntu community support has been phenomenal; these hard working volunteers deserve kudos. Without them my baby steps into Linux might have been a short one or at least very painful.

Now all I need is a Linux Penguin key to replace the Windows key on my teeny keyboard
So if you have been wondering what happened to me I’ve been playing with my ‘puters innards, letting dogs out, letting dogs in . . . and stitching, of course, it takes a lot to keep me from stitching!