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 setting up Spica continues to go well. Win2K works fine. The only capability I don't seem to be able to use is to play DVDs on it, which is unfortunate but livable. Unlike XP, Win2K doesn't have a built-in DVD player. But I own a copy of PowerDVD and did install that. It installs fine, but any time I try to run it it just dies immediately and does a core dump. That same program works fine on my desktop computer which is also running Win2K, so this is probably an issue of hardware capability in the system's display hardware. That's how it goes; it's not exactly fatal.But Win2K works fine, and Office is on it, and ThumbsPlus and about six utilities without which I cannot live (i.e. Batchname, Shoveit, RTVReco) and I got the two computers to network properly. I pretty much have to use NetBEUI for that. Because of how Road Runner is set up, any TCP/IP communications between my computers routes out through the cable modem and bounces at RR's first stage router back down through the modem to my other computer. So when I do my weekly backup of Regulus (the web server), I transfer the 10M .gz file at about 140 kilobits on my 100 megabit LAN, and a backup which ought to take about five seconds actually takes more than ten minutes. But when my two Windows computers talk using NetBEUI, they talk directly at 100 megabits. (Anyone know of a NetBEUI driver for RedHat Linux?) This business with RR's modem doesn't appear to be solvable; it's been a problem for everyone here as long as I've been using it (4.5 years) and people a lot more savvy than I am about TCP/IP and networking have not found a fix for it. It's a pain. Anyway, now both Spica and Antares (the desktop computer) can see each other. That's better than Canopus (the other laptop, which ran Win 98SE) ever did; Canopus could see Antares but not the other way around. Anyway, remaing to be done is to get NERO installed and make sure I can burn CDs, getting the wireless LAN to work, and calling Microsoft and getting them to let me register Frontpage. It is installed on Antares and was installed on Canopus but won't be used there anymore; with registrations on three different computers (in six months) Microsoft's anti-piracy filter has kicked in and they refuse to register it. And Frontpage will only let you use the program 50 times without registering. Online registration doesn't have any mechanism for appeals, so I'm going to have to talk to a nice Microsoft operator. Oh, joy. Once that's all complete (and a few other things, like making the Buslink USB HD's work), the plan is to install Backup Now! and then make a full snapshot of the system disk so that I can recover in future without having to go through all this again, if something happens. I figure it's going to take another couple of days to get the primary setup done. (discuss) |
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