Friday, Debtember 19, 2003
It's a bit sluggish, but it works
I was able to use the Gentoo installation disk to boot the
laptop, get the dying harddrive mounted (had to turn off DMA operation in the IDE device driver to keep the
kernel from crashing) and rsync
all the important files to my
main server. But that still left me with a dead laptop, and now a D&D game that pretty much
requires a laptop (since Bob is doing the whole online thing, as Bob is now
using kLoOge.Werks to help run
the game).
It was then I realized I had a copy of Knoppix lying around. A live CD distribution of Linux. I popped in the CD and in a few minutes was greeted with a live Linux system, running X and already on the network. Not too bad. The default windowing manager of KDE is a bit sluggish (then again, running of a CD isn't exactly a speedy experience either) but there are other options. TWM is very lightweight (not as lightweight as 9wm but more usable than said 9wm) and IceWM is also fairly lightweight (well, compared to something like Enlightenment or KDE). Knoppix makes the system usable, until I can get a replacement harddrive for the system.
Now, only if I can stop playing solitare on the darned thing …