Another of the aphorisms by which I try to live my life is: try to have a different set of tools from everybody else; you need to have a “core set” that is the same as everyone else’s, but electing to suffer difference for its own sake does lead one away from monoculture syndrome – plus it also tends to drive a usefully different perspective from other peoples’.
So: I received last week a nice, inexpensive, adequate for those tasks for which I will want it, IBM Thinkpad R51 which I obtained with the help of my friend Ian (thanks, mate!) – the Kubrickesque black weight of which distinguishes me from colleagues who of course are all driving AMD-powered Acer Ferraris.
Shortly after unboxing it, I booted Windows XP – my first Windows system at home since 1994 – and spent the next 20 minutes making the following noises:
- ooh?
- urgh!
- what?
- click where?
- no! no! f**k f**k f**k! don’t do that!
- no, really, don’t do that…
- look, i already have an internet service provider …
- what are you doing now?
- why are you rebooting?
- yes, there is a wireless network; that is the correct password …
- yes, really.
- what?
…and so forth. This somehow-incredibly-long 20 minutes really made me appreciate my iMac.
Finally I managed to shut-off most of the annoyances, select screen optimisations for “performance”, and navigate enough of the system to defrag the disk, install Firefox, and shut it down.
Today, in-between bursts of presentation-writing, I was feeding CDROMs and DVDs into the brick, and have emerged at the other end with a Quad-Booting Laptop.
Nifty! (if you’re a geek)
In retrospect it was much easier than I feared:
I used the Sun JDS Linux / SuSE repartitioning tool to delete the recovery partition and squash the WinXP partition a little bit; then I set up the following partiton map:
| # | OS | Size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Win XP | 12Gb |
| 2 | Solaris 10 | 8Gb |
| 3 | NetBSD 2.0 | 4Gb |
| 4 | Extended | rest of disk |
| 5 | Linux Swap | 1Gb |
| 6 | FAT32 Spare | 2Gb |
| 7 | FAT32 Spare | 4Gb |
| 8 | Linux Root | 7Gb |
…temporarily masquerading the Solaris partition to be of type “Plan 9” in order to avoid any confusion or hassle during Linux installation.
Then I installed Mandrake Linux 10.1 from DVD into partitions 5 and 8, set-up LILO, and rebooted to permit a 5 minute install of NetBSD 2.0; this necessitated taking great care to not provide any bootloader names for the partitions, nor install the NetBSD bootloader at all, but aside from staying alert the installation was trivial.
Three down, one to go; I test-booted all the software, let them self-check, finishing with a Mandrake boot in which I added:
other=/dev/hda2
label=Solaris
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/hda3
label=NetBSD
table=/dev/hda
…to /etc/lilo.conf, mirroring the chain-bootloader entry for the WinXP partition. A quick poke with fdisk reset the partition type for hda2 back to “0x82” – which annoyingly means both “Solaris”, and “Linux Swap” – and then I rebooted with the Solaris 10 DVD.
It just worked. The Solaris installer did err on the conservative side by suggesting I only wanted 256 colours on my 1024×768 display, as opposed to my desired 16 million, but that was fixable and otherwise the installation of SUNWCall went smoothly – but I won’t go so far as to say it was a particularly pleasurable user-interface experience.
The side-effect of the Solaris install was to blow-away the LILO bootloader (how rude) but a quick reboot off the Mandrake DVD in “rescue” mode fixed that, since it has a “automatically find a Mandrake partition, load the lilo.conf and rebuild the boot loader” option – very useful.
So: surprisingly, it all works, exactly as you would expect it. My laptop is fit to provide me with the X86-based operating systems capacity that I’m likely to need for work and play in the near future.
Next: to get a new Powerbook, as an upgrade for the system that lets me do what I want to do creatively…
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