*qt cries for you*

Topless pictures always cheer me up, too. :P

grrrrrr

ut oh....that's not the impression I meant to get...I'm sorry Blythe. : (

heh.. it's ok.

She's just messing around. I was too.

: /

Try GRUB. It can read your filesystem, so that kind of thing happens less (and you don't have to run it every time you change something). Also if it fails, you can edit an existing boot option or drop to the GRUB shell. I love it. And its boot menu looks a lot cooler than LILO :)

Yeah, everybody says how cool GRUB is. I guess I'll make the plunge and learn it.

I'd ask you a dozen stupid question about how it works, but I'll go read the documentation instead.

Debian makes GRUB especially easy to install; there are only three steps to get it up and working:

1.) apt-get install grub

2.) Run "grub-install /dev/hda" to install the stage 1 boot loader into the master boot record.

3.) Create a file /boot/grub/menu.lst which tells GRUB which operating systems to boot and how to boot them. My menu.lst file contains the following:

default = 0
timeout = 10

title Debian GNU/Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz apm=on apm=power-off

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

The only tricky thing here is that hard drives are numbered starting from 0 instead of 1, which is different from LILO's behavior.

I tried the "run Windows but install Cygwin/Emacs/etc and pretend it's really Unix" things with my laptop. Don't bother. It's kind of cool at first, just that it comes anywhere near the real thing, but all the little differences will bug the hell out of you.

Running Linux or BSD inside VMware, otoh, seems like a reasonable strategy. You can run VMware under Windows if you need to for hardware support, and adding the layer of abstraction makes it easier to recover from disasters. (Need to back up before upgrading your kernel? Copy the virtual "disk" to a backup file or burn it to CDR. Or make the "disk" undoable, do the upgrade, and commit the changes if it worked and roll them back if it didn't.)

check out how much trouble it is to get debian on an Apple iBook.

although it's kind of neat that he gets a triple boot (OS9, OSX, and debian) I don't get the POINT of putting linux on apple hardware.. you're defeating the whole point of buying an apple!

if you really want a cheap linux laptop get a Sony SR laptop. $999. anyway, I'm rambling.

Heh, Cygwin is pretty cool once you get used to it, and as long as you don't expect it to be a lot like unix. I just use it instead of a DOS shell because otherwise I end up typing ls, which isn't particularly productive. I also like using a rxvt instead of a winoldap (Win9x here) since at least then I can resize it properly.

I also got LiveJournal running mostly okay on the same Windows box using Apache Win32 1.3.6 (couldn't be bothered to upgrade it since it's getting deleted soon anyhow), mySQL Win32 and a little jiggery-pokery. Boy was it slow though.

If you can cope with it not being exactly like unix, it's fine. I generally only use it so I can diff -u without scping back and forth between linux boxen and this windows box! :)

Of course, once I build my new box all of this messing around will no longer be necessary.

I pictured this Win32 Emacs to be some shitty hack that they did to get it to run under Windows... turns out to be really nice/functional. Me likes.