A Macintosh for me?

One of my friends who works for a school board has offered to send me their used Macintosh computers. Of course I accepted; I've always wanted to have my own Mac.

The problem is shipping. Apparently these are the older Power Macintosh clamshells, so they are hefty. They're also a tad old (300MHz for the best), but I don't really care; an old Mac is better than no Mac.

Plus, I can finally try out Mac-native Photoshop :D

Finally, the camera is to be repaired.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally was able to call Canon Customer Service, and spoke with a friendly David, who gave me a service call / RMA # for my digital camera. It will be nice to be able to take pictures again.

I'm also still enjoying reading the UNIX book. It's quite amazing what I've been missing; I'm really glad I decided to purchase it.

Ah, a relief.

First off, I'm reading a book entitled "UNIX: A Visual QuickStart Guide". It's a little noobish in tone, but even I am learning things out of it. I'm quite enjoying becoming even more powerful with the CLI. I had no idea how powerful awk was. You learn something new every day.

Meanwhile, the relief comes in the fact that I washed my car. Not really admin-related, but it needed to be done, and man, it's nice to see my car shine again. :)

Debian breaks in mysterious ways.

/me blows dust clumps off the blog.

Sorry for such a delay in making a new post. I've been terribly busy, but thankfully the computer systems are running fine...

Except for one of my friend's MacBook. He wanted to install Debian on it so that he could have a Linux machine, but apparently Debian doesn't like his machine; more specifically, his network controller.

The problem isn't that Debian doesn't work. He'd like to uninstall. Only now he can't seem to get Mac OS X back on. Bah.

OpenOffice renders documents better than MS Office

I was having a terrible time trying to do a complex product catalog using Microsoft Word 2003 on my Windows laptop. I was unaware that OpenOffice.org had a version of their software that would run on Windows xp.

I downloaded it, installed it, and opened my Word document with the OOo Writer. My document not only looked better, but it actually understood the formatting that I used and rendered it correctly!

FOSS wins over Microsoft once again.

I got my lappy back!

After the whole floppy disk fiasco, I considered wiping the disk and installing Windows 95 from the old 30 floppy set I have. Imagine my surprise when I realised I left the Windows xp CD in the disc drive, and it began to boot!

As fast as I could type, I ran FIXBOOT from the recovery console. I am now writing this from my laptop! YAY! :D

I'm incredibly excited! I am copying my important documents to the file server, and they will be burned on the next burn cycle.

Windows setup doesn't work with USB.

My laptop is suffering from a corrupted Windows boot sector resulting from NetBSD's installer overwriting it during its setup program. The CD drive is also acting very strange; sometimes it isn't even recognised by the BIOS during POST (it seems to not be getting power), other times it is detected by POST but kicks out during boot up (causing a 60-second poll delay), and even other times, it works for so long and then kicks out after the system is booted.

Because of this, it doesn't seem to want to boot off my Windows xp disc. I figured that since I had a new pack of floppy disks to break in, I'd download the xp setup boot floppies. I did, and used one of my few remaining Windows desktops to write them.

I booted off the 6 floppy disks using my external USB floppy disk drive by Sony, because the laptop came with no internal drive (and the external came free with the laptop's purchase). It took a long time, so I cleaned the TFT, and it looks a lot better now. Anyway, when it was done reading the final disk, it printed "Setup is starting Windows..." as is normal. However, after a short delay I was greeted with a STOP 0x0000007B error (Cannot read from boot disk). After querying Google, I found that Windows xp Setup cannot be started from Sony USB floppy drives. What luck.

It's starting to look like I'll never get that laptop working...