dive into mark

I’m posting this from my new Sony Vaio laptop, given to me by my new employer. One of my co-workers is happy I got hired, because he got a new laptop out of it, and I got his. The first time I booted it (into Windows 2000) and tried to shut down, it complained about various tasks that couldn’t be shut down properly, subsystems that has crashed, and so forth, so I quickly decided to wipe it clean and re-install Windows 2000 from scratch. (My boss had said I could do this, and that I could set up a dual boot if I wanted.)

Installing Windows was painful and slow. And when I rebooted, I discovered, as expected, that it hadn’t recognized my Linksys wireless network card. I had to dig out the Linksys install CD that came with it, and then go into the Advanced properties and manually change the network type from ‘Ad hoc’ to ‘Infrastructure’. This took me several hours to figure out the first time I did it (on my last laptop); this time was much smoother, since I remembered each of the stupid little steps I had to take to get it to work. More disturbing, Windows also hadn’t recognized my video card; I had to root through Sony’s support site to find the correct driver. Then it was off to Windows Update to install service pack 2, IE5.5SP2, and a veritable plethora of security hotfixes. Click, click, click, wait, reboot. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Then I installed Red Hat Linux 7.2. I had intentionally left unpartitioned space on my hard drive when installing Windows 2000, and I told Red Hat’s installer to use that free space to install Linux. It defaults to using GRUB, the GRand Unified Bootloader, to dual boot between Linux and Windows. (GRUB is a replacement for everybody’s favorite, LILO.) The installer correctly defaults my video card. (Thanks to Windows’ idiocy, I knew it was correct, because I had had to figure it out myself when rooting through Sony’s support site in crappy 640×480 VGA mode.) It claims to be installing PCMCIA support. Next, next, next, reboot.

GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader, the new-age replacement for LILO) comes up. I boot into Windows first, to make sure it still works. It does. I reboot and select Linux. It boots into GNOME in 1028×768x16. I open Mozilla and hesitantly type ‘www.google.com’. Success! I have wireless Internet access. I drop to a command line and set my hostname: Oliver. No need to reboot. Welcome to Oliver.

Next step: StarOffice.

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