Roscoe's Public Notes

But not for much longer. Heh.

It appears that his video card didn’t burn out after all, because he came back to life this evening! Yes, he did! All by himself (almost).

Lemme ‘splain wha’ happened. (Roscoe slips temporarily into his Ricky Ricardo persona.)

After reading Mike’s post about his recent experience with Xubuntu, I decided to download an iso image, burn it to a CD, and try installing that OS to my ancient laptop. At this point I must add that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for the USA download site to offer the latest Xubuntu only as a DVD download. For cryin’ out loud, folks, ancient computers don’t have DVD drives in ‘em! What’sa matter with you peoples! So I went to a Canadian mirror to download the iso as a CD.

Installing the Xubuntu OS to my old laptop, now running Slackware version 9.0, is a project I’m saving for later this month. Yes, I’ve always got lotsa’ projects, both ongoing and pending. Don’t know for sure how this one will go, Slack is aways the premier OS for running on old machines, while the Debian based OSs have never been particularly known for this, but, I’ll give it a try.

But, back to Big Feisty. In recent days I’ve switched some of his hardware over to Lil’ Feisty, just so I could remain productive, but I’ve not pulled him off the home network. Deciding to try to reviving him again, I fired him up long enough to let me open the CD drive (he boots primarily from CD, then to floppy, then to the OS on the hard drive) and slipped my newly burned Xubuntu disc in, just for the Hell of it. Rebooting again, I was treated to a BIOS related splash screen (?!) where I was asked to verify that, yes indeed, I was using a CPU that operated at a shockingly low mhz. value.

Again, lemme back track a little and explain part of the philosophy that guides my computing life. I like to do the most possible with the least possible. In other words, I choose to run the most “cutting edge” software that I possibly can, on the oldest, cheapest hardware I can find and/or cobble together. So yes, my primary work computer does run off a chip that was considered humble five years ago.

So I checked the appropriate box on the strange BIOS splash screen, and the computer proceeded to boot up into the Feisty Fawn OS resident on the hard drive.

Hmm….

Pulling the Xubuntu disc out of the CD drive, I figured this would be as good a time as any to upgrade the OS on that machine. So at this point in time, as I sit here at the home work station preparing this post on my Kubuntu Feisty Fawn box (Lil’ Feisty), Big Feisty is being upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version, 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon.

If all goes smoothly, in less than an hour Big Feisty will cease to exist, he’ll be no more. In his place will be “Big Gutsy.” We’ll just see how that goes, won’t we? As always, the adventure continues.

The small cameraphone grab of the upgrade splash screen above can be seen larger by clicking on it.