Installers

I'm still trying to get my windows box back on its feet. It turns out that the PIII 1Ghz won't stay running for more than a few minutes and the motherboard can't reliably detect all the RAM. I guess the first problem is due to overheating (there's no thermal paste on the processor, and it's not one with a heat spreader. Also, there's no thermistor, so I have to sort out a P2T at some point to see what that thing actually runs all.), but the second problem is much more serious and indicates that the BX chipset is not stable enough at 133Mhz FSB. That is a very old motherboard (Rev 1.04, dating from mid 1998), so I shouldn't expect miracles from it. I guess my best budget is still to find a S370 motherboard somewhere. With that in mind, Mojo is now running the PII 350 again. This is still the most stable processor I've ever encountered. Even at work, my main Linux box is a dual PII 450, which just bloody runs and runs and runs. Hmm, I just had a though that I have a few spare Celeron chips, which have a 100Mhz FSB, so they wouln't be affected by the RAM issue.

Meanwhile, I started attempting to revive the Win2k installation on the box. Forget it. An SMP (multi-processor) Win2k install barfs when finding only one processor. Digging out the CD revealed the world of pain which is a windows install. Honestly, I don't know what people are on when they say that Linux installs are too difficult when compared to Windows. I know that they've certainly never installed Win98, and probably never installed Win2k.

I gave up on the enormous pain in the butt which is installing windows, and decided to install RedHat 9 on one of the spare SCSI disks in Mojo.

• Put CD in drive
• Reboot
• Answer a few simple questions (Workstation? Server? Which Disk?) and sit back and watch it.
• Reboot when finished

And it doesn't look as if the guy responsible for the CGA card colour scheme was in charge of the graphic design of it. The last few RedHat installs (since about 7.0) have been bright and colourful, or have a text only option, because almost anyone with a video card has more than 16 colours. And if they don't, they're going to choose the text install anyway. With a Windows installer, on matter what video card you have you get the same 16-colour display. Reboot into safe mode, if you want to see how it works. Or, alternatively, smack yourself in the head a few times, shoot yourself in the foot, and ring up Bill Gates and get him to come around and insult you for a while.

At work, all I have to do is copy the RedHat install CDs to a network drive, make some boot floppies and I can install RedHat at the speed of the Network card. Takes about 30 minutes for a full install, plus some post first-boot configuration. (Then there'll be some local configuration issues, like which NIS server to use, that sort of thing), but even most of them get picked up when doing an upgrade.