More Computer Issues

Well, my laptop decided it didn’t want to be nice anymore. Truthfully, it is my fault. I tried to use some very experimental software to sync my PocketPC (with Windows Mobile 5.0) to Linux. It required various kernel modules and user space software, which eventually really hurt the system.

I ended up with a load average of over 4.5, and no tasks using the CPU. I removed all the kernel modules and software, and could not solve the problem. Boom crash.

So, I lost about a 1/2 weeks worth of time, but everything seems to be working again just fine.

I backed up /etc and /home, and installed Sabayon  on top of my stock Gentoo. Sabayon is Gentoo based, and so far, I love it. All the work I put into setting up my Gentoo laptop was done automatically. A nice distribution that I would recommend. True, it installs way more than I actually want, but really, hard drive space is cheap.

My only problem turned out to be VMware. I have Windows XP Pro installed on a partition, and I either dual boot, or use VMware to run Windows under Linux. Under Sabayon, the drives (yes, IDE drives) are ‘sda’ instead of ‘hda’. Whether that’s the problem or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that VMware crashes while loading GRUB. Great.
The good news is that Codeweavers Crossover Office 6.0 runs most of what I need. Microsoft Office 2003 and Quicken 2006. I can’t sync my Pocket PC, but oh well.