Well there goes summer for a bit. What a difference from the last few days!.

Anyway, I've been playing about with Linux for a couple of days now. Don't really why I keep insisting on having another play when most of my software is Windows based anyway, but there you go.

The idea this time around was to have a Linux distro on a pen drive or two so I could boot up either Windows or Linux as the mood took me. Basically I was bored Hi!.

Simple right?. Ermmmm!.

Bought an 8 gig pen drive, which will host Ubuntu easily, so downloaded the iso via the program 'Universal-USB-Installer' . (Later I was to do it again via the program 'unetbootin-windows-494'). The drive was formatted FAT32 first by the way.

Rebooted the desk top to boot up from the pen drive, and all seemed ok. That is until the screen became covered in pretty colours and everything froze. This actually happened before when I tried a Ubuntu 11.10 disc that came with a Linux mag. Brilliant! I thought. Stitched again. Had to hard shut down and reboot to Windows.

Meanwhile I had been downloading 'Puppy Linux' in the same way on my notebook. (That would fit on a 1 gig pen drive I already had) That done I abandoning the desk top and tried rebooting the notebook to Linux. Although the pend drive showed in the bias and the alternative hard drive was dissabled, all I ended up with was an error message to the effect of no boot disc detected. Nice one!. The day is really going well Hi!.

I tried the 'Puppy' pen drive on the desk top, and it fired up and ran the distro ok. Mmmmm, what's wrong with the notebook?. Searched arounf for clues on the web, but couldn't find any. Logically the book should be seeing the pen drive as a boot disc.

Looking at the Properties on the onboard drive, I noticed it was formatted as ntfs, as opposed to fat32, which is on the pen drive. Thinks!. I wonder of that's the problem?. Never gone into the ins and outs of formatting before so just relying on logic here. Anyway, I tried formating the pen to ntfs. Naturally a snag arose. The pen drive was write protected. Would you Adam it! No switch on the pen either.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after trawling the net again, I finally managed to un write protect it and re-installed 'Puppy'. Rebooted, and guess what. It still wasn't recognised, damn it!.

Tell you the truth, I can't now remember if it was the first install (fat32) or second (ntfs) that worked on the desk top. But I managed to waste a couple of days yet again, playing with Linux Hi!. I really wanted the choice on my notebook, not the desk top.

Probably the only way to install Linux on the notebook, is to use a ready made disc via an external drive. Anyway, that's it until the next time I get bored enough to try again.

Back to SSTV, Opera and Broadcast I guess.