Again with the Linux

[desperance]

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?

Comments

[euphoricstimuli.livejournal.com]

btw, my boyfriend has just acquired a copy of 'Alice in Sunderland' form work (social research company -their not actually sure why it was sent to them). It's very cool, you are involved in some good stuff. :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Isn't it lovely? I adore being connected with that. Long after my own books are forgotten, I'll still be a part of one minor masterpiece...

[euphoricstimuli.livejournal.com]

I don't think your books will be forgotten that easily. Even if your publishers are being a bit of a nightmare doesn't make your work any less good.

I did like the cartoon of you though, it was really quite good ( & as far as I can remember from the BSFA fairly accurate). It must be so cool to have a comic book version of you out there in the ether. True imortality.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It did try to baffle me by suddenly demanding passwords;

"Say 'friend' and enter."

What other reason could there possibly be, after all, for a response time of Nearly Two Weeks?

It is a very big book, and I, for one, am still reading greedily (and have reached Part Six). And loving it, if that helps...

Mellon!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Thank you; it does help. A little. (S'not that big, though. Not any more. Snf!)

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

My agent says to hold off a couple of days sending him my latest outpourings as he has just received a 180k word fantasy from 'another client in the North East' and he is busy reading that.

Do we share the services of Mr J?

You'll gave to admit that 180k Chaz words need more savouring that 180k of most of our words. Which is why we love 'em.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I b'lieve we do, if your Mr J is my JJ.

On the other hand, he's clearly lying to you (unless he has yet another client in this region). The book is barely more than 150K. Unless I've sent him the uncut version by mistake...? *panics*

[carandol.livejournal.com]

Here's the Mepis page on partitioning and setting up the hard drive.
http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Dual-Boot_System

It only takes about 20 minutes, though, so you may have to find something else to distract you too :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I have done this before with other distros, and I'm not sure quite why I'm so nervous this time - except that the LHP comes with an extra "rescue" partition already, and the internets are full of warnings about accidental deletion of this crucial facility. I have dutifully copied everything onto rescue disks so I think I'm covered anyway, but I've just been infected with a viral anxiety about the whole process.

I shall overcome! Later today. Maybe...

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

I believe some manufacturers have the facility to burn a copy of that recovery partition to a CD (or DVD). This is usually a once-only option. I suggest you do that if you can, to give you that extra sense of warmth.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Is done already: the nice man I bought the machine from had done it already, and passed the disks along. I could do it again, though, it's not once-only; and indeed I intended to (give me belt and braces and trousers that fit!), only it needs DVDs and I've only got CDs except for rewritables, which are verboten for this process. So I've postponed that and decided to trust the disks I have. Maybe.

At the moment Windows is defragging. There seems to be no measurement of progress, in Vista; it helpfully says "this may take from a few minutes to a few hours," and that's all you get, no hint of a metric or an estimate. I didn't really need reminding why I want to switch to Linux, but there it is anyway...

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

Has it finished yet?
Windows XP does actually give you a percentage,and the expanded display (if you select it) shows the sectors being moved about, which can be quite hypnotic.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

See, that's what I remember, from defragging in the Good Old Days: watching the little bits of info being shuffled around. That was fun.

As far as I remember, I have never defragged anything in Linux. Whether this is sloppy heedlessness on my part, or whether it happens automatically, I dunno; it just never seemed to be necessary or called for.

As far as this particular instance is concerned, I was on the very edge of posting an oh-my-god-how-do-I-tell-whether-it's-still-working-or-is-just-hung-up-and-broken? when it did finally stop. God knows why it should've taken so long, given that the previous owner had set it up on an automatic weekly cycle and I've barely added any data in the last week of poking at it, but hey. It's Windoze.