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The horrors of Linux
Sep. 11th, 2007 11:35 amIn what I can only describe as a moment of temporary insanity, I had a go at running Linux on my desktop yesterday evening. Whitney had been needing some extra space on her computer and wanted to shovel some files onto my external drive, but Mac OS X doesn't provide support for NTFS file systems so it looked like I would have to repartition it and provide some FAT32 space. (Sorry, this is turning out to be duller than most lectures on the same subject I attended. You can stop reading now if you like.)
It turns out that Windows XP doesn't allow you to drag around the sizes of partitions without completely reformatting a drive, although I'm fairly certain - in fact, I know - that Windows 98 could do it. It must be something to do with the change of file systems. I had a look for solutions online - the options seemed to be buying Partition Magic for about $60, downloading a command line one that looked like it would happily erase an entire drive if the wrong character was typed anywhere, and getting a Linux distribution because it has the ability to quite happily mess with partitions. So the preferred choice was obvious. After burning Linux Simply MEPIS Something to CD, I rebooted and watched.
Everything seemed to go well for a few minutes, with a rather nice blue boot screen giving some indication of slow progress. Then it noticed my external hard drive and panicked, vomiting out a rapid series of
At that point I felt it best to try again with the USB drive off during boot and hope that somehow it would be able to read it after boot, but I wasn't hopeful. With it off, it got right to the end of the boot process, stayed on a blank screen with the wristwatch icon for a moment, then started up with a friendly default background depicting a black and yellow warning sign complete with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it.
I tentatively nudged the mouse around a bit, and it seemed to be working despite the screen looking like it was trying to report that the computer was actually melting. I changed the terrifying desktop background first, then went into the partition manager, which is helpfully in
It's good enough to eject the CD before it shuts down, making sure that it doesn't immediately boot back up into the scariest operating system in the world again. The gesture was appreciated, but that disk isn't going back in my computer at any point in the near future.
It turns out that Windows XP doesn't allow you to drag around the sizes of partitions without completely reformatting a drive, although I'm fairly certain - in fact, I know - that Windows 98 could do it. It must be something to do with the change of file systems. I had a look for solutions online - the options seemed to be buying Partition Magic for about $60, downloading a command line one that looked like it would happily erase an entire drive if the wrong character was typed anywhere, and getting a Linux distribution because it has the ability to quite happily mess with partitions. So the preferred choice was obvious. After burning Linux Simply MEPIS Something to CD, I rebooted and watched.
Everything seemed to go well for a few minutes, with a rather nice blue boot screen giving some indication of slow progress. Then it noticed my external hard drive and panicked, vomiting out a rapid series of
Received bad response from USB device messages. When Whitney pointed this out to me I tried switching off the device, which caused the messages to scroll down the screen even more rapidly and be interspersed with Dead USB device warnings.At that point I felt it best to try again with the USB drive off during boot and hope that somehow it would be able to read it after boot, but I wasn't hopeful. With it off, it got right to the end of the boot process, stayed on a blank screen with the wristwatch icon for a moment, then started up with a friendly default background depicting a black and yellow warning sign complete with a skull and crossbones in the middle of it.
I tentatively nudged the mouse around a bit, and it seemed to be working despite the screen looking like it was trying to report that the computer was actually melting. I changed the terrifying desktop background first, then went into the partition manager, which is helpfully in
System > Administration Tools > Kernel Rooting Systems > Keep Out, This'll Break Your Computer > Disk Tools > GPart, or something close to that. As expected, it couldn't find the USB drive even after ten minutes of spinning, and not feeling like outrooting my subsigned drivers or whatever it is that Linux people do, I decided to retreat.It's good enough to eject the CD before it shuts down, making sure that it doesn't immediately boot back up into the scariest operating system in the world again. The gesture was appreciated, but that disk isn't going back in my computer at any point in the near future.
