On Friday I got my brand new 2 Terrabyte hard drive and started installing it. Odd things happened, the 2 Terrabyte drive was only listed as 1 terrabyte in the OS install, and when I checked it was the same in the BIOS. Looking for answers I found out that some BIOS’s will add a small file to the hard drive, but put it at the end of 1Tb so blocking the first terrabyte from being seen. A search around found a bootable disc ISO which could be written to a CD, booted and move the file thus giving the full 2 terrabytes. In case anyone else ever needs it and ends up here it’s called HDAT2 and is available at http://www.hdat2.com/ it’s very fast and easy to use.
So with 2 Terrabytes available I had decided to go with Debian Linux (arbitary decision based on nothing much except stuff read online and that it is similar to Mint which I’d been testing before but allegedly more stable and the fact Ubuntu’s interface is incredibly horrible). I installed Debian but it failed to install Grub boot loader (I found out since that it’s a known bug with the DVD ISO) so I still couldn’t boot my pc from my Hard Drive. After some head scratching and surfing on my phone I decided to install Mint as a second OS in a 100 gb partition and hopefully it would install Grub and find Debian.
It worked, I had a dual boot system which booted into Debian or Mint. Then I realised Debian was ugly and had an upside down topsy turvey interface which took multiple clicks to start a program if you could even find it. God damn Linux and all its choices. After a while I found out this was the Gnome desktop environment and I could change it (yay for Linux and all its choices). A scant 3 hours and some spell casting in the terminal (it’s kind of like going back to DOS but harder to do because it’s case sensitive) and I had KDE and LXDE desktop environments loaded as choices at login time, and Gnome is still ther if I ever want to remind myself how bad things could be. As an aside, if anyone developing Gnome ever reads this then NO, Just NO.
So I have Debian, I have Mint, I have no Wireless connection. Lots of tinkering with drivers and I found a forum post in Ubuntu forums which told how to find out the USB stick type and how to install drivers from the manufacturer again all in cli (copy and paste is so useful now). That didn’t work, but the next one I found did have the correct incantations to the gods of cli to make my WiFi work (open a terminal and type lsusb and if you have an entry for a Realtek RTL8188CUS the info is at this Ubuntu Forum Post to make it work I will be trying it on my Raspberry Pi later too).
I also played around with some old game emulators, but can’t get Genesis / Megadrive emulation working as none of the packages work for Debian AMD64, maybe I haven’t invoked the right gods with the spells I cast in cli yet. Amiga emulation is good enough in Debian with E-UAE though and allowed me to play the free to download game Putty Squad which was recently released as ADF’s to the Amiga community and is a great game, download it at System 3’s website. Here is a screenshot of the bit I’ve seen most of so far…
Now I need to figure out how to get Debian as the default booted operating system in Grub2 and how to make KDE the default desktop when I log in without having to select it. Guess I’ll have to cast the Runes and incantate in the terminal cli some more.
