My T41 left me!

My IBM T41 has left me!

Not for good though. Tangentially related to my last post is another hardware failure. My IBM T41 / Fedora Core 4 laptop had it's video card go on the fritz. Crazy quilt patterns were on the screen rather than KDE 3.4. Having it fixed was pretty easy though: I called 1-800-IBM-SERV, told them all about it, they mailed me a box, and I sent it in to get fixed.

But, now I am bereft. I had no idea how much I lived on Linux till my main squeeze left me. All my old blogs were there, all my email, all my documents, all my pictures, All my LinuxWorld work, all my pre-configured applications and workarounds like Evolution, Crossover office, VMWare, OpenOffice 1.9.125 (2.0 Beta 1). In short, everything I use to get along in an MS Windows centric world from Linux. And everything I do outside that MS centric world too. I had it all square rooted, configured, and ready to go.

I kept the hard drive of course. It's right here in this USB enclosure, attached to my SUSE 9.3 test laptop. I can get to everything now that I have configured a user on the laptop that has the same UID as what I had on the Fedora core 4 laptop. But it's clumsy, and feels like the work-around that it is. This system is my test system. There is nothing wrong with SUSE other than I am not "moved in" here. And Evolution doesn't work right. I feel lobotomized!

The Linux desktop is certainly a reality to me: I had no idea how much till it was gone.