My Rants and Thoughts

I had a breakthrough on the weekend and was finally able to install yellowdog 3 on a Mac powerpc 5400! The problem I had was that the drive was too small. I got my hands on an old drive I had that I forgot about - a 2.3 gig drive onto which I put a 150 meg Mac os partition (8.5) and set up the rest for yellowdog. Once I did that it installed like a breeze! It took about 6 hours from finding and installing the drive to completing the install and package updates. Now I have a running linux server on a mac.

So I've been working on a project to convert an old Power Mac into a Linux server. It's not really going so well, although in theory it's easy - I have probably the easiest linux distro to use in this case (Yellowdog) and I have enough ram and hard drive space, but it keeps crashing on me, when I go to format the boot partition. I'll work through it and get it right but I have learned a lot on this project. For example, I learned how to make a Mac boot disk from scratch. Coming from the PC world it was quite an experience for me. I also learned how to initialize and format (many many many times) a Mac drive, as well as how to identify the different hardware parts inside the mac case. (I didn't realize how difficult it could be to even get into the #$#^% cases!) So I've worked myself through a lot of the hardware and software mac issues. I now have a Appletalk network setup on my home network (I have my Linux server actually hosting the appletalk protocol -...

Too much - I have work on my mind, as well as business ideas I'm trying to get off the ground, and a whole bunch of "what if" questions. I have a vehicle that may not start when I get out of work (dead/dying battery), a friend coming to my house tonite with a dead computer (could be something as simple as a power cord, or something as major as fried components), and a ton of other things going on. And I'm still trying to learn linux, although I'm proud to say that it's been quite a few months of strictly fedora now, with no signs of withdrawl. In fact I'm finding more, useful stuff in the open source world that is supplementing my need for MS branded software. The only thing I haven't found (mainly cause I haven't spent a whole lot of time looking) is a personal financial mgmt software like MS Money. But when the time comes (and it will be soon) I will find something I'm sure. So that's where I'm at.