It will feel very strange to turn on a newscast and hear a different story being discussed. I’ve heard that the rest of the world has had the temerity to continue to function while the US was busy worrying about the election; of course, I won’t know that it’s true until CNN tells me so.
Red Hat is up
This afternoon, I finally got my old weird PC Server 330 running under Red Hat 7.0. I’ve been fighting it for about a month; trying to install over the LAN was a total failure. Copying the CD images to the local hard drive and installing there almost worked — the install went OK, but then the system wouldn’t boot (I may just have been suffering from having the Linux partition above the 4GB line, but it was too painful to try to figure it out). So I burned CDs, and then the install went smoothly — except that I couldn’t get X to start. Eventually, I brought down XFree86 4.0.1, and now I can get by; I still don’t get a graphical login screen (just the plain old text login), but I can tolerate that.
I wish I knew what I was going to do with the machine, but I couldn’t leave it just sitting idle.
Oh — the reason the system is weird is that it has a RAID disk controller (but I think only one disk), and two video cards but only one display. This machine has, shall we say, somewhat unsavory parentage.
DVDs may be taking over
Jeffrey is doing a book report on a biography of Henry VIII (in the Famous Dead People series), and Diane happened to mention that the BBC series on the Six Wives of Henry VIII was good. So I went to Amazon to look for it; the VHS version was $70 and out-of-stock, while the DVD version was $68 and “usually ships in 24 hours”. Well, I can hope. But I don’t think I ever saw a Laser Disc more available than the corresponding VHS tape, so maybe this is a Good Sign.