Linux

So, I did research on Linux tonight, and I'm edgy about the whole thing. I wondered what I would really be gaining, besides "sticking it to Windows".

I suppose I'd be learning lots of new geekery. That's worth something.

Regardless, I decided to go ahead and try out Ubuntu in the short-term, perhaps switching to SuSE if I decide I really can live with Linux and no Windows. It couldn't hurt too much, right?


My CD-drive is fried, so I can't write the ISO image to a disk and boot with that. I do have a handy 1Gig thumb drive, however... but the instructions say that you need to build the thumbdrive with a Linux system. Hmmmn.

I thought perhaps I could cheat with Cygwin, which I have installed (another reason I'm feeling odd about the move)... but it turns out you can't redirect STDOUT to a directory. No worries, I'll just go... to... /dev... wha?!? There's no /dev in cygwin.

[dig dig] Okay, there is /dev, but for some unexplainable reason, they hide it from you. You can still type /dev/sda and get to the harddrive, for example. Weird. But there's no /dev dir, and you can't see everything that's there. They do, however, point to a utility that makes this possible. I install. I run. /dev appears.

And it's huge. Nothing is clearly the USB drive... and I'm not sure how to find the bloody thing.

I decide to start heading each of the mount points, and I find that, indeed, /dev/sdf seems to be accessing by thumbdrive (by virtue of the fact that the thing blinks as I head it). Neat.

I zcat the boot image to the drive, I copy the ISO image... and... OH MY GOD, it's Saturday!

Time for sleep. Plenty of time for this over the weekend: the wife is away, so I'll be bored, anyway.

Fear and trepidation... mixed with perverse glee. We shall see.