It’s 8:30pm, which means I’m allowed to do hobby things, right? So, I’m going to try again to install Linux (RedHat 9) on a spare computer. Last time, I wasted several hours trying to install it. It turns out that, despite what the Linux boosters say, you can’t install it on any old computer you have lying around. For example, the computer has to have a functioning motherboard. Take that, Linux heads!

I spent the past hour putting in a new motherboard, cpu and power supply. The thing actually works. It’s a 1.7mh Celeron with 128M of RAM. The motherboard has sound, video and networking built in, not like when I was a lad and the only way to hook up a monitor was to attach 256 filaments to a breadboard using a shoulder-mounted soldering iron.

In the time it’s taken me to write the above two paragraphs, RedHat has seemingly partitioned my hard drive and is installing the default set of packages for a desktop configuration. Cool. The UI is a little techier than I’d give my mother (well, Mom’s dead, but you get my drift), but if you just keep hitting the “Next” button, it seems to work. At least so far.

RedHat says I have 12 minutes and change before the OS is installed. I’m excited. Really.

12:15am: I’m up and running, although still a few screens short of a desktop. It would have happened a couple of hours sooner but we went to see Searching for the Friedmans or whatever the name of that documentary is. Excellent. I came back a minute ago and immediately checked the progress of the install. Basically done. RedHat is asking me a couple of questions, has had me register (I like their privacy statement) and now is checking to see if any of the packages I installed need updating. Still some needlessly obtuse moments: I don’t know what RPMs are, but I trust that it doesn’t mean Rape and Pillage Machines so I’m just clicking Yes whenever I can.

It seems to have done a good job figuring out what hardware I have, but so does XP at this point. And it’s put me on the network with no fuss, but so does XP. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I can see whether Linux will see the other machines on my home network, all of which run XP.

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Like everyone else who’s been on the Net for more than a year, I have in effect lost virtually all my emails, at least in terms of an operational definition: I need a search engine to find anything that came in more than three hours ago.

I’ve been quite happy with Find, a fast seach engine that also indexes your desktop files. I’ve been using it since it was in beta and have watched the product team sand down the rough edges.

A new version is now coming out. I haven’t tried it because I’m still being extremely cautious about what I load onto to my fragile PC, but I will as soon as a week or so has gone by without a major system crash.

For reasons that surpasseth understanding, Find at find.com has been renamed to X1 (as in the plane that first broke the sound barrier) at www.x1.com I can only assume the company was sued.

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Linux boosters (and aren’t we all?) should be slightly cheered to know that my rebuilt basement PC failed to install Windows 2000 in the same way it failed to install Linux. Looking very much like a hw issue. I’ve just the flashed the BIOS, but now we’re leaving for the 4th so I won’t know if it worked for a few days.

Good. I could stand the break. Damn computers. Damn Intermenet!

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Continuing from last night’s humiliating defeat….

I booted from the floppy this morning and rooted around, so to speak, just to see what I could see. It seems like something is installed on the hard drive, but I can’t tell if the kernel is.

What I used to know of unix is coming back to me. It’s just like riding a bicycle: if you don’t do it for a long enough period, you get too stupid, fat and old to be able to do it again.

I’m reinstalling now, using the “noprobe” parameter, although I think the problem is in my hw. Sigh. I’m telling the RedHat installer to install only the GUI desktop packages, hoping to get through an install without something blowing up…

It got through the installation but now warns me that no kernel packages were installed on my system so my boot loader won’t be updated. I don’t know if that means that no new kernel packages were loaded or that I’m truly a boy without a kernel. I guess I’ll find out in a minute when I reboot.

Nope. Booting from the hard drive still causes the system to hang: black screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I’ve got to go. I’ll try again later…

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It started off well. I dragged an old computer up from the basement, put in a brand new hard drive, and started to install RedHat 9 fresh out of the box.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. The BIOS is from 1999 and it doesn’t know how to boot from a CD. But the Norton Ghost floppy I’d made boots into PC DOS which then recognizes the CD, and we were off and running.

But RedHat reported that the second CD was corrupt, which I find unlikely since it’s fresh out of the sleeve and has no obvious scratches. But, well, what the heck. I’ll just reboot and start again. Heck, it’s just like installing Windows after all!

But Linux has killed my hard drive. My system tries to boot from it but hangs. The BIOS is old enough that I can’t force it to boot from the floppy. [Note: Ok, so I just found where in the BIOS it lets me boot from the CD. I’m not as screwed as I’d thought.]

I was so excited as the first CD was chugging away. Now I’m a bitter, cynical old man who is forever going to chase children off his lawn.

LATER: Booting from the CD. Let’s see how well RedHat recovers from its maybe bogus problem with the second CD. I’m excited again.

LATER: Before the first disk finished its re-install from scratch, my system went back to terminal (non-graphical) mode and told me that install has terminated abnormally, right after X server started succfessfully. It’s unmounted a bunch of filesystems and is telling me I may safely reboot my system. So, I don’t know if it’s broken or not…

It’s not booting from the hard disk. I’ll move on to attempt #3.

I just ran linux rescue. It seemed to work, or at least it didn’t complain. But I can’t see that it did me any good. I’m rebooting and starting to reinstall.

This time I’ve told RedHat that it’s an upgrade, not a reinstall. It’s at least asking me about boot loaders. Maybe this time the hard drive will learn how to boot itself rather than going into the terminal twitches. Hmm, now it tells me that “No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed.”

Ooh! Ooh! It’s asking me if I want to make a boot diskette! The massive oak door of Linux is about to swing open. I’m about to be given the key! It’s also further than I’ve gotten so far in this multi-try installation. In fact, RedHat is announcing that the installation is complete. I must be missing a heck of a lot of packages, though, since I only made it through Disk 1.

Damn. It’s still not booting from the hard drive. And with the bios set to boot from the CD first, the system is hanging if the CD is empty. I’ll switch the boot order and try booting from my spiffy new Linux floppy.

Booted from the floppy. It’s now noticing (for the first time?) my mouse and USB ports. Progress, I assume. Damn, now it’s asking for localhost login, but I never gave it a user name or pwd and I don’t know what the defaults are. Googling it on my Windows machines takes me to redhat.com where it almost explains it: If I didn’t create a user account during the installation (which I didn’t because installation terminated abnormally), I can log in as root and use the pwd I created for the system. Ok, but it’s not real clear how to log in as root. So, I’ll do the obvious thing and type “root.” And it works. It doesn’t even ask me for a pwd. But, now what? I’m at a command prompt and about all I remember from Unix is that “ls” lists files and “rm *.*” probably isn’t a good idea, and it would be an even worse idea if I remembered the parameter that makes it recursive.

My nephew, Greg LinuxMan Cavanagh, who administers Linux clusters for a place where you need special clearance, suggests that I try telling the bios that my disk is smaller than it is since Linux just needs to install a loader and will figure out the actual size once it loads, which is pretty cool. But, unfortunately, changing the disk size has no effect.

Onto my 4th attempt to install it. This time I’m telling it to switch from the GRUB boot loader, hoping that this will force it to load a frigging boot loader. Also, I’m telling it I want to configure which packages should be installed, again hoping that this will force the RedHat installer out of its complacency. I’ve just told it to install all 4.5 gig of packages, figuring that if I pick and choose, I am guaranteed to fail to pick the ones I need. It’s chugging along. I’ll try to stay up long enough to see if it rejects the second CD again, but it’s getting late and I have to get up early tomorrow…

Disk 2 is in and this time it’s working. (So far.) I think I’ll head off to bed.

One more quick check…and it seems to have frozen while installed “evolution.” I’m not going to blame Linux for this. Could be a hardware problem. Nope, still not booting from the hard drive.

Good night.

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As my PC seems to be fairly stable – only one crash in 24 hours! – I’m beginning to think about trying out Linux. I’ve bought a copy of RedHat and I’m beginning to clear out one of the hard drives in my machine. But I’m frankly frightened about dual-booting XP and Linux given the fragility of my machine. So I’d like some advice.

Here’s my situation. I have a fresh install of XP on my 120G boot drive. I will have lots of room for Linux on a 60G drive currently formatted as NFTS. I am ok with scraping everything off of that drive and repartitioning and reformatting.

I want to start slowly with Linux. I expect to spend most of my time in Windows for now. That may switch, depending on how things go with Linux. I will continue to have a hell of a lot of data in Windows formats. I also expect to need to boot into XP for some Windows-only apps, including games.

I am wary about monkeying with boot sectors. I will be really really pissed – at no one in particular – if in the course of installing Linux, I end up having to reinstall XP and all of its apps. But I also want a transition path; if (for example) I start off by booting Linux off a floppy, I’d like to be able to boot off a hard drive once I’m feeling more secure. But boot decisions seem to be forever.

So, does anyone have any links that explain it all to me? Or tales of woe and rejoicing?

As ever, thanks.

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The always read-worthy Scott Kirsner writes in the Boston Globe today (note: Globe links rot) about Gotuit Media, a company that “indexes” video. Indexing in this case means that it divides video content into chunks tagged by its content so that you can choose to watch “just the highlights, or the ‘best hits’ or the top plays by Tom Brady, or even a 20-minute Reader’s Digest condensed version” of a football game or any other video. It takes software and humans to tag the video, an expensive proposition but perhaps worthwhile to cable providers and others who will sell the smarter content to the likes of us. (Gotuit also has a branch doing TiVo for radio.)

I wonder how much of this could be done right in a TiVo box. I don’t know what metadata is embedded in the video stream, but Pinnacle Studio, among others, does a good job of figuring out when scenes have changed in a digitized video; I assume it looks for a significant change in the pattern of pixels from one frame to another. If TiVo increased its processing power, it too could offer scene selection. Speech recognition would let it find all the plays in a game where a particular player is mentioned. If it has access to closed captioning, then it could do some text indexing as well. And if it had some high-end visual pattern recognition software it could to the thing that traditionally has driven entertainment technologies: it could automatically find the nude scenes in any movie.

Scott also reports on a lawsuit brought by Pause Technology charging TiVo with infringing on a 1995 patent held by Jim Logan and a partner.

Pleeeease don’t let them take my TiVo away!

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…knock wood, throw salt over my shoulder, kiss a leprechaun, pet a cobra, blow out the candles in one breath, pour out some wine, vote Republican.

It seems to have been a conflict between my Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard and Kingston HyperX memory. The PC store (ICG Computer in Brookline) put in a lot of hours tracking this down, and now that they’ve switched out the HyperX for whatever is the next best type, the system seems to be stable. At least it’s been up for almost 24 hours. (And now, of course, I just jinxed myself.)

Let me add some keywords in case someone with the same problem is searching for information: Crash. No BSOD. Cold Boot. RAM. Hyperthread. Flashed the BIOS. Pulled out cards. Swapped graphics cards. Reinstalled XP. Reformatted. Repartitioned. Many times. Tried everything. Not heat related. Haunted. Cursed. Get a Mac. !@#$%!-ing computers!

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Yup, it’s back in the shop. I never did get the !@#$-er to work and I don’t think they will either. My attempts include: Taking out the ATA card. Replacing the graphics card. Turning off hyperthreading. Turning off the onboard ethernet and putting in my old ethernet card. Running the virus checker every night. Running chkdsk several times. Spending about $20 on the Radeon support line finding out that they don’t know nuthin’. Contacting ASUS and being told that it could be lots of things. Nevertheless, all day long it’s gotten worse and worse, crashing to a re-start at closer and closer intervals. You’d almost think it was a heat thing except the motherboard monitor says it’s a cool 90F in there.

So, I’m thinking about my alternatives. I spent a chunk of money on the new mobo, RAM and case. I don’t know that the store will take it back since it seems to work when they take my drives out so it seems to have something to do with my software. (After a clean install of XP and with only Office XP added, it was still crashing.) So, I may have a major piece of metal on my hands. Suppose I were to try linux on it? (I forgot to try booting up knoppix before I dropped it off at the PC shop. Damn!)

I do need Windows for a few reasons. First, I want to know what the rest of the world is experiencing (=suffering). Second, there are some business docs that I work with that use Office features that Star Office doesn’t offer. Third, I play games. So, maybe I take my high-end graphics card out of my current machine and replace it with something simpler. I build a new new machine, not as high-end, to run games and Office and Quicken. I use the current new machine as my daily linux box, even though the new machine is way over-spec’ed for linux.

Hmm.

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Continuing to crash the ol’ PC. The latest was more polite than usual. As I was working, my screen snapped to 640×480 with 4-bit color. A message box said that there was no driver for my graphics card (Radeon 9700). It rebooted to the minimal resolution, but I was able to get it back to a reasonable display by using Display Properties as usual.

So, is there a problem with my graphics card, or did something else wipe out its drivers? (XP’s error reporting system says that it’s a problem with the ATI driver, but I had already installed the latest and greatest.)

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