Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Today was a soldering-iron day. I'd been putting this off.

Finally got a replacement power supply fan installed in tipton, my main Linux box. Booted it up and it couldn't mount some important filesystems. So I spent the next couple of hours beating my head against the keyboard in frustration trying to get richards, the file server, to start serving NFS again -- I'm not sure when it stopped. I still need to get rupaul, the Win95 box to boot -- I was thinking that I could do without it for a while if I get either the donated machine that arrived a little while ago or the donated machine due to arrive tomorrow configured to be a Faster Spiffier Linux machine / X server / print server / OpenOffice beast ... and then I realized that I'm depending on Word Perfect for a bunch of stuff, so I need to get it working again anyhow or wrestle with conversions and fine-tuning page layouts and such. Whee. Recently-arrived machine needs a new fan (I was given two; I'll see whether the one that didn't fit in tipton will work in this machine).

Need to figure out how to fit a third monitor on my desk, obtain cables for KVM switch, or convince myself that using Win95 over VNC isn't going to drive me batty long-term. (That third option is not out of the question.) Also need to decide whether to transplant rupaul's drives into a faster machine (one of the donated ones) instead of leaving a more recent OS on the one about to arrive or installing a recent Linux on the recently-arrived one ... how hard will it be to tweak the registry under Win98 to accept all the software currently installed under Win95 if I just transplant the drive with the important software on it? Then there's the idea of transplaning the drives from boygeorge, the NT machine, into one of the faster boxes.

Too bad I can't afford a copy of VMware. Then I wouldn't have to feel silly about running an older OS on a box that'd be happy running a newer one -- I could just make the old OS and all its installed software a guest OS in a virtual machine. Eventually, eventually ...

Slowly machines get upgraded. Maybe soon the file server can get more suitable hardware.

But I never got my nap and now I'm grumpytired and I have to brave rush hour traffic all the way out to Frederick. At least playing a gig ought to cheer me up a bit.