Again with the Linux

At carandol's suggestion, I have tried Mepis 7.0 in the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, and yup, that runs too. It did try to baffle me by suddenly demanding passwords; but hah! I fooled it with smoke and mirrors! (The password for the demo account is "demo", and the password for the root account is "root". How smart am I, to figure that out?)(It may actually be standard practice, but I didn't know...)

Maybe tomorrow I'll see if it's up for partitioning my hard disk and going for a full install. Maybe. I have to be doing something. It is becoming more and more clear as day follows day that - useful as all my current activities undoubtedly are - I'm really just waiting, to hear from my agents about the Big Bad Book. And the more time passes, the more anxious I become, the more that waitingness rises up like a rock out of the ocean of my busyness.

[/bad seabound metaphor]

I have pretty much convinced myself by now that they both hate it: that they are conspiring, indeed, between themselves, over who gets to tell me how much they hate it. What other reason could there possibly be, after all, for a response time of Nearly Two Weeks? And counting?

Not. Her. Fault. Apparently

elisem gives us the Long Rede in LOLcat. 'Nuff said. In eight words, as it happens.

I iz Mighty!

Or, possibly, I iz Mighty Relieved! (And yes, I know I was trying to break myself of lolcat-subject lines, but in this instance I am allowed a petty indulgence.)

I present, to my left, laz'n'gemmun, the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection. With three, count 'em three, boot options: the Windows rescue disk; Windows Vista yuck spit; and SimplyMepis Linux. All three of them apparently working jus' fine. Yay!

Nor was it hard, on anything except my nerves, and only then because - as ever! - the printed instructions and the online instructions and the actual keyboard-and-screen process differed all three from each other, just a little, at a couple of crucial moments. But hey, we muddled through.

Now all I have to do is load my WP-of-choice into the Linux partition, and then wonder vaguely how to set up wifi (not that I have it at home - yet - but the Lit & Phil does. Sometimes. When it's working...), and I'll be sorted. For the nonce.

Alternatively I could leave these last things unsorted - for the nonce - and do some more worky-reading. Or, perhaps, some indulgent non-worky reading. Or...

*is the soul of virtue, and fetches his WP CD*

ETA: forgot to say, huge thanks to carandol for encouragement and help and nudgings...

A tad more mightiness

Okay, done that too: TextMaker is loaded into Linux and set up to run. Not, again, without a hint of hassle, because - although they both run KDE as the graphical front-end - nothing in Mepis is quite the same as OpenSuse, and I had to figure stuff out a bit. Finding how to open a terminal? Really shouldn't be hard. Isn't hard, but you have to know where to look. Like that.

Also, I have demonstrated to my own entire satisfaction that I really want a little mouse I can plug in somewhere. Touchpads are all very well as a fallback, but they make my arm ache. And are slow and awkward by comparison, and besides, this particular touchpad seems to be hypersensitive, or else I'm accidentally pressing things I didn't quite realise or intend; I keep having things happen that I didn't mean to ask for.

Also, oh you who are accustomed to touchpads: is there a touchpad-and-button equivalent to the scrollwheel on a mouse? It's a feature I've grown fond of, and I find I miss it...

Also, I have now unplugged the LHP and closed its lid in a spirit of scientific experiment, to see what Mepis has in the way of power-saving automatic shutdown systems. Thus far - it's been about ten minutes, I think - it has blanked the screen, but not done anything else. We'll see...