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...

Gentoo, part II

After multiple attempts at booting off the Live DVD that I received with a magazine, I finally figured out that it wasn't the laptop's buggy disc drive, it was the disc.

Since I don't feel like downloading a 3.8 gigabyte ISO, I am just downloading the "minimal" disc image. Hopefully this will boot and install.

Introduction

Hello.

Welcome to my blog! This blog documents my life as a (primarily UNIX) Systems Administrator, or sysadmin. It can be challenging, but also rewarding.

I primarily run Linux on workstations, and a BSD variant on servers, though I do still have a few Windows nodes left on my network. I generally lean towards NetBSD -- I find that it has better support for the hardware I use, and is extremely small, fast, and portable, which I value in system software.

I don't necessarily have the latest hardware; indeed, some of the challenges I face are maintaining older systems. But I find with the proper utilities, any Pentium Pro-class machine can be a useful X11 workstation, even if only for Web browsing.

So the story begins...

Choosy Admins Choose Gentoo (?)

I've had a terrible experience trying to get WINE to work on my NetBSD laptop (network name WKST003). Apparently the memory layout is different than it is on Linux, and WINE developers have not yet fixed the bug.

So I decided last night to install Gentoo on it. I have a 2007.0 DVD-ROM, so I decided to boot off of it. Bad idea. This laptop's disc drive (a QSI DVD-ROM from what I can gather) has a problem. I can't exactly tell what's wrong because I have yet to hook it to a multimeter, but it appears that it is not holding power. More on this later. It spins the disc up, and boots the ISOLINUX kernel, but cuts out in the middle of booting and (apparently) corrupts the squashfs image, resulting in the GLI segfaulting when trying to bring up the network card. So it seems that my laptop will, for the foreseeable future, continue to run NetBSD.

Now I've decided to bring one of my old workstations, a Pentium II/300 (WKST002), out of retirement and install Gentoo on it instead.

After this gets settled, I am going to make a Web site and put up some specs and pictures of my computers. But I'd like to get one of my workstations running Gentoo before Monday.