Canada Day, At War With Birds, and Geek Machismo

Finding time for blog posting (and reading) has been difficult as of late. Hopefully that will change shortly. Between the Canada Day long weekend (involving a trip to Canada's Wonderland with my daughter and a spontaneous family picnic) AND a battle with the family of birds nesting in my kitchen fan duct, I made the mistake of fiddling with my computer a bit too much. As sure as death and taxes, I seem to do this at least once each year. This time I decided I wanted to do a fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper on my XP/Linux machine. I was running Dapper already but it was upgraded from the previous version and I was finding it a bit sluggish. Call it a show of geeky machismo, but it seemed like an easy proposition to me... Hah!

Well after a couple of late nights becoming intimate with disk partitioning, installer iso's, and the GRand Unified Bootloader, I have managed to get a fresh install of Dapper up and running. The only remaining task right now is to get XP booting from the multiboot menu - it currently lists both OS's but only boots Ubuntu. I can boot XP by futzing around with the partitioner but this will render Linux temporarily unbootable in the process.

I'm sure it's a fixable problem and likely something simple, but I think I'll go without XP for the moment (I *can* access my XP drives for data) and see how it goes. I might find out that I need it less than I think.

Some notes for the Linux naysayers:

And for those who will undoubtedly say "this is exactly why Linux is not ready for primetime", it should be noted that installing Ubuntu by itself on a machine is reportedly dead easy (I'm not quite ready to completely ditch Windows ...yet). When you're dual booting with XP it can sometimes be a bugger. While Linux plays nicely with other OS's, Windows is notoriously antisocial. Every dual-boot install guide I've read (and I've surely read my share!) recommends installing XP first and then Ubuntu because doing the reverse usually bludgeons your Linux install.