After last night's No Sleep rambling, where I stated all that crap I was about to do, guess what I actually did? Absolutely nothing!

It didn't take long for the reality to sink in that I was mentally and physically fatigued as hell, and any attempt to continue would not only have been unfun, but a potential health hazard. So, I threw in a load of laundry (cause I've been putting that off for several days now) and went right to bed.

This morning, I woke up still a bit sleepy, but feeling much recovered.

Went to work. Worked. Ate lunch. Worked some more. Goofed off just a little bit. Worked some more. Came home. Ate dinner with parents at Country Buffet. Mmmmm, good barbecue. And lots of it. Came home stuffed full.

(Oh, and between the "Came home" and "Ate" part, I called RMI again. No further information on Covad's diagnosis yet.)

Naturally, upon arriving back from dinner, I was definitely due for some quality time with Argo. I allocated an outlet for the new surge protector, transfered Dagobah's keyboard, mouse, and monitor connectors over, occupied another of my hub's free ports, and powered up.

Went through the BIOS screens, checking everything out, looking up various items in the manual that I wasn't quite sure about. Just getting familiar with things. I don't think I actually ended up altering anything from the defaults except the system time, the admin password, and the bootup sequence. Quite a departure from previous experience with past BIOS setups in my earlier PC's. But I will say, if you want to, you can customize the hell out of this thing, performance-wise. It's just that the choices it picked turned out to also be the ones I preferred. :)

After that little ritual, it came time to install... something. I looked through my collection of ancient, ancient, ancient cds. Just for the hell of it, and because I knew I'd be wiping and repartitioning before long anyway, I stuck in an old FreeBSD cd I had gotten as part of a pack from CheapBytes years ago. It didn't boot. Neither did any of the other cds in my CheapBytes collection from the stone age. Well, what can you really expect for $1.99 cds ordered years and years ago?

I looked through my floppies, and found an old Slackware boot/root rescue pair. Booted successfully with those, and then stuck in the old CheapBytes Slackware cd. Tried to mount it, and got some very cryptic errors. IDE drivers too old for my hardware? Bad data in the bootup floppy's mount program? Scratches on the cd? Faulty CD-ROM hardware (perish the thought)?

I hadn't a clue. I tried unsuccessfully to mount another of my old CheapBytes cds. Great.

I sat for a moment, and then just started laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Here I am, with all this wonderful new hardware, unable to install a free (as in beer and speech) OS, posessing a fully functional computer on the other side of my desk with everything installed and working, but finding myself totally stumped. How silly can things be?

It would be easy to conclude from this incident that I am one hell of a lousy planner. While that may well be the case, I don't think it would have been possible to plan for a DSL line that would be down for such an extended period of time. Oh well. It shall be worked out.

I decided the next step would be to run upstairs, check with mom, and see if by chance bouncing had left any of his installation cds behind in her room. I got lucky. There was an old LinuxPro cd in the desk drawer.

I ran back down stairs, stuck it in the DVD drive, and booted up successfully. (BTW, I love the trayless mounting mechanism. Truly a cool aesthetic.) fdisked a measly 1 gig partition for a temp install (cause I knew this one wouldn't be serious), checked "Everything" from the package selection, and let the install program go on its merry way. While it formatted the partition and installed the packages, I decided to go for the full Let's Blow A Fuse effect, fired up the tv, and watched a couple music videos on DVD.

A little over five minutes later, its work was done. (I remember the day when it would take at least a half hour to install a Linux distro on Dagobah from a cd.)

Then came the fun part. Configure your video card. Configure your network. I knew this was most likely going to be an exercise in futility.

<sarcasm> Looking through the list of video drivers, visually grepping for "Matrox G400". Hmmm... don't see it there. Whatever shall we do?!?! Let's pick "Generic VGA"! An optimal choice. "How much video memory do you have?" Scanning the choices... 256K, 512K, 1meg, 2meg, 4meg... That's the end?!?!? Where's the option for 16meg? Doh!

Network. Searching for the D-Link DFE-530TX+... What a surprise! Nothing even close. So much for LAN connectivity. Moving on... </sarcasm>

Well, the installation finished, I booted successfully from the hard drive, and am now able to do...

...virtually nothing of practical use. lol!

Well, I did log in and type "loadkeys dvorak", cause I knew my hands were going to go insane if they had to endure another minute of nasty ole qwerty.

So now, Argo sits anxiously, just aching to be let out of the stable, and run with some real drivers and apps which will take advantange of all that muscle and energy within. I guess this could be called burn-in time.

Well, this rambling has gone on quite long enough, and I need some sleep tonight too! This weekend promises to be quite eventful. I have a sneaking suspicion that both Dagobah, the hardened veteran, and Argo, the feisty energetic young mare, will get their share of adventure this Saturday night. Easy there, girl! All in good time. All in good time.

Traveling
Leaving logic and reason
To the arms of unconsciousness