My new, new harddrive arrived today! And it seems to be working properly - and besides a little fiddling on my part converting the old harddrive to a new partition scheme (thanks to the parted team for saving my ass!) - installation of Debian went as uneventful as you would imagine. Installation in ~15 minutes + hours of downloading X, gnome, openoffice and many other packages. Only tiresome thing is that the eventhough you compile LVM (logical volume management) into the kernel - it can't detect the root partion on an LVM logical volume, it needs an initial ramdisk to do so. Luckily (i thougt) debian comes with mkinitrd - and an initrd should be easy to create - but alas, it wanted devfs - and i've switched to hotplug + udev almost a year ago. So i needed another solution - after some digging i found the lvm2create_initrd tool from the lvm2 debian package - and my 2.6.10 kernel is now running fine.

Next on the TODO list was installation of XP - i had already made the CD (Service Pack 2 so i actually managed to get my anti-virus software installed before i was borged) so it was just popping it in and starting installation - everything went smoothly - but s l o w l y! - over one hour to install a simple operating system without any tools on it! Debian's installer is eons ahead of microsoft's. But i got it up and running, got my virus-scanner installed and installed visual studio .net 2003 comin'-to-get-ya (these program names are just getting sillier and sillier) - i even managed to find some emacs bindings for VS.net - not perfect - but for basic cut-copy-yank and cursor-movement it is alright. There is no C-x b switch buffer support - so you'll still have to use your mouse to code. Go to http://ubertoys.com/vsnetemacs/ and follow the instructions for VS.net bliss - well a bit more tolerable than the microsoft "keys".

It's late so i don't have time to find a nice image to attach to this post - luckily our lecture tomorrow is only at 12:30 tomorrow - the only day in two weeks were we can sleep ;-) Oh, and the lecturer tomorrow is Peter Bøgh Andersen (their server apparently doesn't send Content-type: text/html headers - it renders as text in my firefox.