swestrup | I is Hosed!

I feel like such a newbie! Yesterday, I was doing some minor configuring in Windows XP and BANG! it rebooted. Now I can't keep the OS up for more than 2 minutes at a time. I think I've set some security parameter such that I don't have permissions to run something critical. Sigh. I was up until 9:00 trying to fix the problem, to no avail. I can't even do a simple reinstall, because the reinstall crashes with a mysterious error, probably at the point where it decides to believe the security tags on my drive. This will teach me for putting the security system into advanced mode and playing with ACLs. I'll have to reformat my C partition and reinstall Windows from scratch. I don't think I'll lose any data, since I've always had a policy of storing important data on partitions OTHER than my main one, for just this contingency. Plus, I've booted my machine into knoppix and am using it to backup my C partition before I start, just in case.

As for Knoppix itself, my respect for it has grudgingly gone up. This time when I booted into it, I noticed a message flash by to the effect that my monitor is talking gibbering and that Knoppix was going to have to guess at X parameters. Well, Windows makes the same complaint, so I think my monitor DOES spout configuration nonsense. Given that, I really can't complain if Knoppix chooses somewhat nonoptimal refresh rates and such. Luckily I can see the whole screen if I play with my monitor settings, so the distro is at least usable.

It STILL needs major work on the UI though. I'm currently looking at really badly rendered fonts as I type this, and the fact that the Montitor error flashed onto the screen for less than 1/4 second is not good. Also, I discovered that I couldn't create a new backup directory on my backup drive. All Konquerer would say is "Cannot Create Directory". I finally opened a shell and tried the same thing only to get "Drive is mounted Read Only". Why couldn't Konquerer have said that? Then it took me a while to find out the UI procedure for fixing that. The HELP system, of course, was useless. Still, there seems to be enough good stuff underlying the distro that I'll probably (eventually) download and burn a copy of Gnoppix, just in case its just KDE that I can't stand.

Oh, and of course, this means that any links to images, music or whatever that I've posted in the last couple of weeks will be dead until I've finished reinstalling this thing and have the web server back up. I don't know how long things will be down, because

_sps_ is due here any second, and I plan to spend the weekend doing stuff with him. If he doesn't feel like building a Windows XP then it'll just have to wait until Monday. In the meantime the two best ways of reaching me will be to leave a message here on LJ, or to actually phone me, since accessing my e-mail just got messy (I have web-mail, but it doesn't classify my mail for me, so I hate to use it).