Weekend shit with WinXP
Yesterday I decided I finally needed windows ( mostly to play games and watch all the southpark video’s ). So I pick up WinXP and started the install. People crib about most linux distro’s having non-gui install interface.. well.. WinXP does not either. For most of the install anyway..
It asks me where to install and when I choose the FAT32 partiton, it cribs. When I remove the partiton and try to create one using winxp. it cribbed again. Finally I realised it was the classic 1024 cylinder issue with 20GB hard disks. In the whole process, it wiped out my MBR.
bah
This got worse when I realised my floppy drive was not working. So I boot from the linux cd and jump into the rescue mode. I thought I’ll just run grub and get the whole thing fixed. Well little did I knew Grub sucks. After hacking around with it.. reslised it just wont do it from rescue mode ( I love lilo, coz i could just run lilo in rescue mode). So I said.. what the heck, let me just choose the upgrade option and fix it. Turns out some issues with the cd’s and it does not complete the install, and I dont have any other linux cd’s with me.
So I gave up on it… and went on with the WinXp install. Once it starts out.. it goes well. I’ve been playing with it all say and its actually pretty decent and runs fine on my circa 1998 machine. I tried to work with the WinXP boot loader, but that bombed.. and as I find out from the net… the whole bootloader in XP is screwed. ( maybe it was made intentional ).
So now I’m on XP, using Outlook for mail, putty for ssh , IE for browsing and the win LJ client to make this post 🙂
btw does anyone have any other bright ideas ??? I am getting a new set of cd’s tomorrow.. so things should work
a) The only GUI install that I’ve been impressed with was a Caldera one I saw a long time back. Dunno about newer RHs and Mandrakes, I gave up looking at other distros a while back. The idea is to make things “easy”/”simple”, not “buzzword-ey”
b) Always have a slack CD around. Even if it isn’t the distro of your choice. Saves a lot of ranting later on, on how different bootloaders suck.
c) I wouldn’t touch Outlook with a barge pole.
d) Get a decent vid. card and you can play quite a few games from Linux :p
e) Heh. You’re getting more than just a set of CDs tomorrow…
Use Moz 1.3b, Get hold of Cygwin
Win2k Professional?
Depends on how much RAM you have on the box, but I have been running Win2k Professional on my homebox and it works quite well. If its only for games, ain’t Win98 enough?
Mine is a 600Mhz Compaq deskpro, 15 GB HDD, 320 MB RAM. Win2k Prof. Works well on it.