Posted by sam at June 14th, 2004

    So XP failed to work properly (suprise), which is rather frustrating since the current installation is only a few months old.  Usually I can get at least 6 months out of an installation.  I decided to entirely scrap my hard drive and start over from scratch (previously I had done fresh installs, leaving everything on my hard drive).

    The hardest things to back up were my media files.  I had about 12 CD’s full of music videos, and about 9 CD’s full of MP3’s (read: all legal backups).  Then there were about 4 cd’s full of misc programs and settings and whatnot.

    So I decided I would install linux instead of windows.  My hope was that I could get more then 6 months out of a linux install, and could move away from windows alltogether. 

    I started with the latest version of SuSe linux.  I tried the live CD, the network install, and even downloaded the cd images but no to avail.  Each CD gave me a kernel panic (read: aint no way in hell this cd is booting).  So I tried gentoo.  I borrowed the full CD’s from my friend (which he bought) and their installation was no streamlined for linux beginners.  It wanted me to start off my compiling a new kernel.  So I tried fedora core 2.  Fedora installed but did not detect my devices properly.  After trying and trying to get it to work I gave up and installed XP.

    The XP CD loaded fine, installed fine, updated fine, detected my devices fine, and seems to be working just fine.  I even managed to restore my mozilla profile (mail, passwords, etc.) with only a little trouble.

    So I guess I’ll wait for a few more versions of linux to come out before I try again.  I think it will be ready once I don’t have to compile kernels and type in really long command lines to make it work.