“Prior to deciding to acquire the burner and Partition Magic 6.0
my room for manouevre was pretty tight, so provisionally installing
Linux, using it to rearrange the partitions and winding up with
Linux, Win2k and Win98 seemed the most plausible route.
Incidentally, those of you who insisted that Win2k ran all the best
games anyway would have got me into trouble this Christmas, as
although it seems to run the new ones we’ve got, Whistler doesn’t
run Settlers II, an old favourite with the junior Lettices. Nor is
it clear that it’ll run the ZipCD software, although that’s
probably something to do with Iomega’s dorky OS detecting
installation program.”
“Red Hat 7.0 seemed the logical Linux choice because of
availability and USB and 810E support, but I ran into a number of
issues that made it look like it was more trouble than it was
worth, and that maybe suggest the Linux distros should get their
heads around dealing with newbie installations and Win2k
coexistence.”
“The major reason we’re currently in the buffers on this one is
that both Red Hat 6.0 and 7.0 bomb out during kernel compilation
with a “crc error – system halted.” The Red Hat site includes an
externally produced document on this that says it’s caused by some
kind of hardware malfunction, but as this could apparently be in
any component I’m not about to try to nail it down right now. I’m
quite willing to believe it’s a ‘something wrong with your hardware
and our software’s fine’ error, but if Linux stresses the hardware
more than other operating systems – as I’m told – it’d maybe make
sense for the distros to rig up some tools to help people nail down
whatever’s broken, rather than leaving them surveying a baffling
pile of poop.”