I’m really nervous but at the same time extremely excited for science fair tomorrow. I hear there’s a freshman who got nearly perfect scores on her project! Now that’s just a little insane and that scares me just a little bit, but I know what I’ve got and I know I’m guaranteed to go to Regionals so that’s enough for the moment. I just don’t like losing to freshmen, if you know what I mean, hehe. I just finished my board (it is 2:10 AM on my clock at this very moment) and once I finish this entry I will be heading off to sleep.
Well, the trouble started today when I was messing around with partitions on my Compaq Presario 900 (Kubuntu 7.04 at the time) and trying to mount a new one. I don’t recall the exact commands that I typed into the terminal but it basically caused a kernel panic and when I restarted, I was greeted with the lovely message
“Error opening operating system_”
I immediately panicked myself because a lot of my science fair data was still on that computer. In haste I turned to the Internet for a quick fix but found nothing that matched my case. I found my father’s old WinXP disc (service pack 2 - old stuff) and basically reformatted my computer on the spot without giving it any thought. I’m a little mad about that, personally. I could have just tried the Super GRUB Boot disc but no. I had to be impulsive and screw up.
Well, that was fine. After 40 grueling minutes, WinXP finally started up (on an 800×600 resolution - I can’t bear that, so I don’t have any idea how those EeePC people can deal with 800×400; I would go insane!) My data was still safe on my D:\ partition, so I immediately channeled it over to my web server and over to this laptop (no network connections set up yet to directly share files). Then I deleted Kubuntu off of my laptop and went to download the 7.10 ISO so I could burn it and reinstall via LiveCD (my previous installation was a dual-boot using Wubi). My new laptop actually -can- burn things as opposed to my Compaq, so that was done in minutes and I was well on my way to installing Kubuntu 7.10.
So the installation finishes and I boot up into Linux and attempt to go and download some programs and lo and behold. “Cannot save [file]. Disk is full.”
“… what?!” I choked in exasperation. “I just installed this; there shouldn’t be anything on here!”
Then I realized that I hadn’t changed the option to wipe my entire hard disk and install Kubuntu over everything; I must’ve kept it at dual-boot and didn’t allow it enough space. Checked my disk drives and voila. I only had about 2GB alotted for my Linux partition. Well then. That was rather intelligent of me. Restarted the computer, and there it was, the dual-boot option for WinXP Professional. The first time it was booting up I had been putting away some CDs so I didn’t see the menu and automatically assumed it defaulted to Kubuntu because it was -supposed- to be the only OS on my laptop. Only it wasn’t.
By this time it’s about 1 AM and I start realizing that hey, perhaps I should actually finish science fair first and leave my computer endeavors for another day. So I shut down and went back to gluing papers on my board. Tomorrow (when scifair is done, zomg?!) I’ll do a reinstall and make -sure- that I wipe the entire Windows partition. Yes, I’ve decided to switch over completely to Linux on my Presario. After all, this one boots Vista, and that’s enough Windows for me. Not to mention I have VirtualBox on this one anyways in case I ever needed XP for something that can’t be run in Vista. And yes, I checked that my Excel 2003 box-and-whiskers chart plugin worked in VB’s XP (even on the not-so-legit copy of MS Office 2003 I have running on it; thanks OWA) so I won’t need to worry about needing XP on my other laptop for anything. I fixed my print queue on this one too (I was using my Presario for that as well) so I think all is good.
Oh wait, there is one thing that I need to make sure will work before I switch completely. I need to confirm that my mic works properly on Audacity in Kubuntu as well =/ Last time it took me a good few hours to figure out all that “check input devices” and OSS/ALSA and blah blah crap, and by the time I had to record, my parents were home and speaking loudly. So of course I never got to try it out, go figure.
2:30 AM by the laptop clock. and I’m out.