First before i rant i will say i am yelling at microsoft not you
YOU THINK YOUR DATA LOSS WAS BAD????I LOST _EVERYTHING_. 3 YEARS OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, COMPLETE PRODUCTS.Phew, ok here's the deal. I got my PC with Windows ME. I didn't like it. It was ugly, but i lived with it. Then microshit released XP. I CAN HAVE TRANSPARENT MENUS, THEMABLE WINDOW DECORATIONS, AND A COOL TASKBAR FOR ONLY 300 BUCKS!
Well i'm cheap so I looked up ways to pirate it. I knew the activation thing was tricky but I heard about corporate
no activation needed. Even then I didn't like microsoft, before I even had any problems with it. Other than windows was ugly (I had never used linux...). I found an ISO and downloaded, burned it and popped it in. I was excited, i get the newest most stable easy to use OS available for free! [not sarcastic at the time]. I thought my computer had 128 mb ram but turns out i didnt, dont know how i got the idea that i did. First of all, Windows XP setup did not warn me in anyway, but it did warn me of useless apps that wont work. I'm like, great, who cares if i cant run solitaire. I ran an upgrade NOT a clean install, because as you might have guessed im a lazy cheap bastard. so anyway it installs great, takes a long long time, but installs fine. Boot it up and it takes a bit (remember: 64 mb) to get to the login screen and all, but im in! i have xp! yay! great! but my cursor stops every couple of seconds while it makes the cursor shadows! err...
well i lived with it for awhile, but WOW did it take a LONG time to load stuff, even the display control panel took a long time. In the meanwhile however i was able to use delphi 6 to work on software for my upcoming venture. Please note this software had no intention of being open source, i barely understood open source let alone supported it. By the time i got fed up with how slow XP was i had at least 3 _complete_, _debugged_, and very near packaged and ready to start sales. I had heard about linux from friends around so I (being completely and utterly uninformed and moronic in my trusting ways) downloaded a professional partitioner package and installed it. It had options to resize partitions. Cool. I'll do that. And no, despite having a cd burner with plenty of free cd-rs and cd-rws i DID NOT back up, i guess i trusted windows nt technology.
you should be able to guess what happened, the partitioner rebooted and stopped in the fake xp dos mode and started working. I left and came back to the same screen i left at, something like 56 percent complete. i suspected something at that. i let it sit for more than an hour and it still did not move. the screen said if i pressed 'h' a help thing will pop up. i tried that... nothing. at this point im gettin lite headed. i tried some various other key combinations, ending in ctrl+alt+del which did not work. the final option was to power it down manually. booting it up again caused nice red letters to come across the screen saying 'fatal error: cannot read from the drive' etc. I tried popping in the xp recovery cd, hoping microsoft had included some tool that dealt with this kind of situation. Nah. they had the 'recovery prompt' however, which just didnt work period. trying to cd over to c: did not work at all i did not know about any free tools to recover the data and i frankly did not trust any of them that were based on windows, and i most certainly did not know of any linux tools. so eventually i popped in the slackware cd i forgot to mention burning above
and made the critical realization that slackware must have some sort of partitioning program (the initial message said you have to format it before setup... why didnt i choose a beginners distro??) so i wiped the hd and put on slackware linux 8. well gee now. can you say problems? this was NOT the right distro for me to use obviously. first of all i didnt think i had to install lilo unless i was dual booting, i was used to the os controlling everything. so for quite awhile i booted from the slackware cd
. then of course i was at the console, wondering how i get the gui. at this point i had met someone in a php forum that used linux, and had a linux guru friend, all who used slackware. he told me about X and all. that was my first task on slackware linux, was to get the gui goin. That took me about a week and a half, mainly because i have an intel i810, which requires agpgart, so i had to type modprobe agpgart before i could even run xf86cfg. once i got X going i had to decide a window manager to start. i chose kde. i still choose kde btw. ok im in! now! sound and internet! hehe these two were so extremely easy but how the hell was i supposed to know?? all i really needed to do was modprobe i810_audio and modprobe tulip / dhcpcd and both were done. but it took me about 2 weeks to get this stuff done. in the mean time i learned a LOT and i mean a LOT about how linux works on the inside, stuff that later prompted me to want to take my stab at a linux distribution (still in development, if anybody has an unused host server for packages...). now i am content however, as it NEVER crashes. period. currently my uptime is ahh let me check 8 days, 15 hours and 52 minutes and to let you know 8 days ago i accidentally pulled the power cord out. hehe.
