I’m writing this in a draft in Gmail because I can’t remember my WordPress password. The reason I can’t remember is I’m not on my normal computer operating system. raisinbottom emailed me today with questions about Ubuntu, and he mentioned Wubi, so I got all hyped up and spent the evening fighting with it. Again. My big problem, as usual, is the wireless stuff. When I mentioned to A what I was working on, she couldn’t believe it - I have installed and uninstalled Ubuntu at least four times now. I have a love/hate relationship with the damn thing. I was unable to get the wireless working, but I’m jacked straight into the network right now, so I can at least write this while in Ubuntu, save the draft, and go into Windows (where my passwords are all saved) and post it!

Anyway, today’s classes were pretty good. I enjoyed the project we did in Deaf Studies, and I was pleased to see another friend of mine is now in the class. A few other people joined too so it is now getting pretty crowded! More people came into my Linguistics class too, and it’s now huge, but we can’t get a bigger room so we are all jammed in tight in a semi-circle. It turns out one of the visiting students is emerge’s sister, I was tickled to find that out! I had some quibbles with some of the teacher’s opinions…I had asked about Gestuno, and then later I asked about Esperanto…and she tried to compare it back to Gestuno. In reality, Gestuno can be more accurately compared to Basic English, because Esperanto behaves very differently from either of those. She wouldn’t hear of it though - did I mention she’s excitable? Oh well.

I’m using Ubuntu right now. Again. This is the third time I have installed Ubuntu and the second time I’ve actually had the wireless working. I noticed that the Cisco Clean Agent software required for wifi at my university wasn’t required if you’re on Linux, so I figured Ubuntu was my last shot short of buying a new computer. (firesign3000 reports that it was probably my sucky processor that was keeping SP2 from being usable.) Amazingly, I managed to get Feisty Fawn installed with few problems; it probably helps that I did a wired connection to my router during the installation process, so I was able to get the utilities needed for my wireless to work.

For right now I’m planning on using it full-time, but if I get annoyed with it, I will probably boot into Windows at home and Linux at school. I guess. I dunno. I want to get Wine working too but I know very little about it. Also, for some reason my Firefox settings didn’t port over, so I need to move those; I also need to make sure I have read/write access to my Windows partition, since most of my stuff is over there anyway.

The new version of Ubuntu (called “Dapper”) was released a week or two ago. I held off upgrading because I haven’t even used Linux lately - I’ve been booting directly into XP because that’s where my games and Paint Shop Pro work. But I wanted to see if the Linux alpha version of Second Life ran any better than the Windows version, so I went into Ubuntu. I figured while I was there I might as well upgrade, and I let that run while I was out of the house for most of Saturday.

When I came back, everything had gone smoothly - except the wifi connection didn’t work. So I booted back and forth between Linux and XP, did some research, and asked around in various places. Finally, this afternoon, I got the answer. When I installed Breezy, the previous version of Ubuntu, I had to also install a utility to make the Windows wifi card drivers usable in Linux. Dapper had native support and didn’t require this utility, so it was confused about whether it should use the utility or the native driver. I renamed the native driver, so it would only think to use the utility; after a reboot everything came up working great! I’m back to using Linux for at least a little while, but there’s already a game I wanted to play tonight so I might end up going back to XP in a bit…

I am writing to you now on my new OS! I managed to get Ubuntu installed - and make my wi-fi work! The OS installation was actually really easy. Partitioning the drives was a little scary (I prepared for that last night by freeing up space and then defragging), but the install went quite smoothly, and it looks great. The hard part was getting the wi-fi working because I needed to use the web to look up information, and I couldn’t use the web without booting into XP, etc. But A let me borrow her computer “for a couple of minutes” (I think it turned into at least half an hour) and after some fancy footwork I got it running. So here I am on Ubuntu! (Yes, firesign3000, this is Linux for dummies.)

Now I just have to figure out how to get the Windows partition mounted. It doesn’t appear to be /dev/hda1 like it’s apparently supposed to be, so for now I can’t access anything on my C:\ drive. That’s okay, though - I have got plenty to play with here on Ubuntu Linux.

Added: Aha! For some reason it was /dev/hdc2 instead. All mounted, problem solved. Thanks xmurf!

I’ve been feeling disassociated for a few weeks, and it’s getting worse. I’m losing touch with dear friends, regular friends, and acquaintances. I’m taking things far more personally in message boards than I usually do. I’m just feeling so damn sensitive to everything. I’m letting activities I enjoy fall by the wayside. What is going on?

Also, I have ditched Knoppix for Ubuntu, which is much prettier. I don’t know if I can get it to recognize my built-in wireless card without installing the OS, though, so dual-booting may be in my future. Mmmm, partitioning.