Lost Highway

I'm baaack! Man, where do I start?

Given the strange problems I was having with Linux distros, both bad and good, I decided to head on back to the promised land, and gave PC-BSD another shot. So I began yet another journey down that lost highway.

I ran into trouble right off the bat. For some reason, the "Use Entire Disk" option wasn't working correctly. I'd get a quick message about FDISK, then an even quicker one about newfs and it would claim to be done. But then when it tried to copy the files off the CD, the filesystem was obviously not created and it would complain about not being able to create the PCBSD folder. And I would reboot and try again. The "Customize Disklabel" option didn't seem to work either, because I wouldn't get anything back in the the list box showing me my partitions on the 3rd hard drive.

So then I did something very very stupid. And I came sooo close to avoiding disaster, yet I plunged headfirst over the abyss. I thought I would just see if the installer would at least see any of my other hard drives, because I figured that it wouldn't actually do anything until I said okay, right? Well, yes and no. Before you even get a chance to customize the layout, the installer puts up a dialog box asking if you're really sure you want to destroy all the data on the hard drive. After only a slight hesitation, I said sure, because it's just a warning and it wouldn't actually do anything until I laid out the slices, right?

Wrong. Terribly terribly wrong. It immediately gets rid of all the partitions on the selected hard drive, even though you haven't told it what, exactly, to do yet. And like an idiot, I didn't back up the MBR or the layout of the drive, despite the fact only earlier this morning I had been using a tool that would do just this, the Active@ Partition Recovery, as found on the The Ultimate Boot CD. And instead of using the hard drive with some not so important files on it, I "tested" on my main Windows boot partition. Zoiks!

So I purchased a copy of Active@ Partition Recovery for US$30 and sort of recovered my partitions. The 2gb DOS partition at the front of the drive was gone, but it was, for the most part, empty anyway. I was able to recover the 3 40gb NTFS partitions, but Windows still wouldn't boot. And I couldn't get the "bootcfg" program from the Recovery Boot to install a new boot.ini file. So now I had to either re-install WinXP or push on in my attempt to wean myself from Redmond.

So I hung my head and pushed forward on my PC-BSD install. Turns out, if I just waited a few more seconds, the installer would set up Customize Disk Label list just fine for my third hard drive. Not sure what caused the delay, but there ya go. I decided follow some earlier advice and set up my partitions thusly:

• / - 1gb (I figured in this day and age of gigantic hard drives, why mess with just a 512mb partion?)


• swap - 1gb


• /var - 4gb


• /tmp - 1gb


• /usr - 104gb (the rest)

Although I think PCBSD puts a bunch of stuff in /, like /PCBSD and /Programs, so I'm not sure how well that's going to work either. But I guess it can always be moved to /usr. BTW, the PC-BSD installer goes with the monolithic /, adding only a 512mb swap.

And the install went fine. And I didn't play any funky games with X and it has been pretty stable. cupsd started hanging, so I disabled that. Maybe I'll move my printers to hang off of my other Windows box. I tweak the xorg.conf file just a little to give my 1280x1024 on my main display. Using the ATI driver seemed to be unreliable, but so far the Radeon one has worked pretty well. I'm happy with KdeMail, and I have Emacs, bash and Firefox working. There's a mountain load of tweaking left to be done, but at least I feel like the base platform is stable enough to do it with.

And today I re-installed Windows. It is going to remain a basic installation, pretty much just to play Windows games with. I copied some data off of the 40gb NTFS partitions (PC-BSD does a wonderful job of seeing all my local drives), deleted those partitions and combined them into one big partition with the third one. I installed WinXP and tested it out on some gaming. So far so good.

And now I'm back in PC-BSD. Not sure what I'm going to tweak next. Maybe I'll try the Font tweaking, as some of this stuff looks pretty ugly. Then maybe I'll try to get the dual displays working.