Parnaparnti's Win98 install went well, but the 98 had great difficulty with every piece of hardware on the system except the keyboard and mouse. I decided to try Win XP, knowing that the machine was just within the requirements for it. That install went smoothly, and XP properly detected every device without problem. It runs a bit slowly, but the friend I gave it too seems satisfied with it, and that's what counts.

So Parnaparnti has left my home for a new life. In his place have arrived three new-to-me machines, generously donated by the local library, who now don't have to pay to have someone take them away and recycle them.

The first of these machines has been dubbed 'Adelaide' and has been installed with Win XP and Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The XP did a 98 on me - failing to properly detect the video/display settings. I have a driver disc for that problem, which I'll get to later. Adelaide's primary function is to be my Linux print server; the Windows is there for scanning purposes, as the scanning function of my Epson Stylus combo printer/scanner/copier is reportedly not supported in Ubuntu (and I haven't tried to wrangle with XSane yet, though I plan on it).

I had originally tried to install Lucid Lynx on Adelaide, but the install disc gave me some unusual problems, not the least of which was the fact it would blank the screen halfway through the install process, leaving me unable to interact with the machine at all. So I installed Karmic, which seems to work well. The -14 kernel runs smoothly; the -22 which came with the initial updating does not. Molasses flowing down a glacier would run faster, I think. There are possible solutions to that issue as well, which I've bookmarked and are on my to-do list. For now I'm running -14, which is just fine for my purposes.

The other two machines have not been touched yet. I'll be poking around in those later this month, I hope.

Having received a new Dell Inspiron laptop from one generous friend, I'm working on refitting the IBM Thinkpad another generous friend gave to me a couple of years ago. I have great friends. The Thinkpad will be going to yet another friend who's in need of a laptop, as hers died a while back.

When I used the Thinkpad, I had a 4GB Windows 98 partition and a 7GB Xubuntu Linux partition on it. My friend doesn't want to use Linux, so I'm removing the Linux partition. Easier said than done, for me.

I'm still fairly new to Linux, and partitioning still makes me nervous. I used a Puppy Linux CD to get access to Gparted (my Gparted live disc was a bad burn or something, as it tosses I/O errors everywhere when I try to run it on any of my machines. I got tired of sweeping the I's and O's off the floor, so I switched to Puppy). I saved a session file on Saturday in the hopes of speeding up the boot process the next time I used Puppy. Puppy gave a kernel panic on loading the file, but deleting it solved that issue. Partitioning time. Oh dear.

I couldn't unmount sd6, the swap partition, for some reason, and therefore couldn't delete sd5, the main Linux partition. Gparted said to unmount partitions higher than 5, which was already done - the system was running off the CD, not the Linux on the hard drive. I shrugged and tried the other partitioner that comes with Puppy, pdisk. Choosing the cfdisk option, I didn't see the swap partition at all, and was able to remove the Linux partition. I think my mistake was in maximising the Windows partition with cfdisk. It said that a reboot was necessary, and warned me the partition might be unusuable. Greeeaat. A reboot showed that Gparted didn't know what type of partition remained: the type was black - unknown - instead of the FAT32 that was there before. I rebooted without the disc and confirmed that the Windows partition was unusable. I said a few choice words and went to get the Windows 98 setup disc.

I had originally planned to just reinstall Win98 from the CD anyway, but was worried (and still am) about any proprietary drivers that might have gotten eaten up when the partition exploded. I have a disc with a bunch of files for this machine, given me by the generous friend who gave me the Thinkpad, and I hope that the Windows install will go smoothly and that the machine will not have any hardware issues. It's less of a concern with Windows, of course, but I want to present my friend with a fully working machine, not a machine that she'll have to hand to her husband and say, "Hubby, fix this."

I've utilised fdisk in DOS to delete all the partitions and created one that spans the entire disk. It's formatting in Windows Setup now. Time will tell if this reinstall will go smoothly and my friend will have a nice old Win98 lappy to play with. Personally I think Linux is a better choice for an old machine, but I'm not the person who'll be using it.