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June 10, 2008 -- END OF THE LINE; BOOTING DISASTERS
After six months of hardly touching Linux,
I decided to reclaim my disk space from the Linux
partition I'd created since I ultimately could not get Ubuntu to boot
or to come out of standby consistently on my system, and since
my wife's reaction to Linux was most assuredly negative. Using
Partition Magic 8.0, I merged the partition back into my
NTFS partition, but this was an unmitigated disaster, because I
removed the partition with the GRUB loader that Linux had installed,
and immediately afterwards, my computer wouldn't boot! Word to the
wise: if this happens to you, put in your XP start-up disk,
go to the command-line
recovery console, type "help," and try the commands that look like
they'll fix the boot. There are two, and FIXMBR (fix master boot
record) did the trick for me. Do not, under any circumstances,
select "Repair my XP installation," like I did before I discovered
the FIXMBR command! This completely trashed my XP installation, reverting
it back to its 2001 state. It did leave my files and settings and apps
intact, but I had to spend four hours updating XP back to its modern
state--very painful! A week later, I tried to merge my main boot
partition with another partition (combining two 120 GB partitions
into one 240 GB partition) using Parition Magic 8.0, and that
was also very bad. I had to fix it with the command-line recovery
console again, and it ended up not "taking." That is, once I finally
got my system to boot again, the partitions hadn't been merged.
I'm not impressed with Partition Magic 8.0. This thing is
supposed to be on its 8th major revision, so you'd think it would
guarantee that your computer could boot after it did its work!
January 6, 2008 -- SOME PROGRESS
IrfanView doesn't work quite as seemlessly as I thought in Wine. It is
functional, but the keystrokes don't work for some reason, and I can't
get it to seemlessly be my default image viewing app. Fortunately, the
default image viewer in Gnome isn't terrible. It has some of the key
features I like about IrfanView--a hot key to go to the next picture in
the folder and hot keys to switch between native resolution and "fit to
screen." But it's not nearly as complete feature-wise as Iview. Next
I want to add image rotation options to the Nautilus menu when I right-click
on an image. I think I've found some threads that tell how to do this.
One of the important things about that will be not to change the mod date
on the image when I rotate it.
December 28, 2007 -- TIME TO EXPERIMENT
I am using (or abusing, as my wife would put it) the holiday break this year to
start investigating Linux on my PC. My ultimate goal is to be free
of the chains of Microsoft and shed their O/S before I feel compelled to
upgrade to Vista. I bought Partition Magic and re-sized one
of my HD partitions so that I could add a Linux partition. I then installed
Ubuntu 7.10 and started tinkering. It's slow-going, but I am getting more
confident about making the leap. I initially spent a couple frustrating hours
figuring out how to get Ubuntu to successfully wake up from standby mode
(it is a must for me to have standby mode be workable).
I needed to switch to a more
suitable video driver for my ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV than Ubuntu
originally selected in the install process (it chose a generic
VESA driver). Other things have gone
more smoothly. Most of the games I have (Hoyle and other) play
perfectly in Wine (a Windows Emulator for Linux). Wine emulation was
also improved when I switched to the more appropriate graphics driver.
Quicken 2007 does not work in Wine at this point, but MoneyDance
($30) looks like a very good alternative and did a good job
importing the .QIF file exported from Quicken. Today I just got the forward
and back buttons on my Microsoft Intellimouse
to work (not at all obvious, but somebody had already
done all the legwork at UbuntuForums.org).
Linux has a ways to go to
catch the polish and robustness of Windows, but it's come a long way and I
like what I see. For one thing, Ubuntu automatically mounted all
of my Windows NTFS volumes when it installed, so I can read and write to all of my Windows HD
partitions. That makes file sharing a snap. I didn't try installing Ubuntu
on an NTFS partition itself, though. I wasn't that brave. Linux also
seemlessly intermixes 64-bit and 32-bit environments. You truly get the best
of both worlds. Wine is hit and
miss. It runs a lot of Windows programs very well, but others (usually newer
stuff which presumably uses some newer API calls) flop. I'm committed to it,
though. I don't want to install VMWare. What's the point of switching to Linux
if I have to keep around a legitimate copy of Windows, after all? My wife's
only comments so far have been "I'm not impressed!"
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