i ordered a new hard drive on wednesday because my existing hard drive was making quite a ruckus even when idling. a quick google told me that my hard drive was probably on its last legs of life. so i did a bit of research and found a lovely deal on a Western Digital Scorpio 120GB 5400rpm 8MB cache hard drive for $150 counting tax and shipping. i planned on backing up my data on thursday after school, or friday morning because i had no classes.
during my first class on thursday the hard drive failed as i was typing some notes on an Atwood poem. i had to try my hand at taking lecture notes by hand (after a year without doing so). the results were less than spectacular. fortunately, it was an introductory lecture to cinematography terms. i had a nice and relaxed night. couldn't do any real work, so i read a good chunk of Alias Grace and watched The Office.
friday was when the drive was slated to arrive. i hoped that it would arrive early in the day so that i could spend a few hours installing stuff because i had a small research assignment on Intelligent Design due on wednesday. alas, it arrived at 5, just in time for me to head over to the church. i tried to install xp before aletheia, but i was silly and only brought an xp pro ugrade disk. hurray for wasted day.
i sat down to install xp at around 12:00 and met setback after setback (the product key didn't take). after 5 tries to repair the installation and 3 hours, i ended up deleting the partition and starting from scratch. that finally worked. i loaded the necessary drivers and went to sleep.
some time later this week i will likely install a Linux distro. here are the ones i'm eyeing:
Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) - the most Windows-like distro
Zenwalk (based on Slackware) - the screenshots i've seen makes it look a bit like the set up i have now
Symphony OS (based on Debian) - a completely different desktop environment which might be fun to try
i have only very limited Linux/Unix experience, namely a computers class a few years ago with a Linux nerd. everyone had to use Red Hat. this puts Gentoo out of the picture. suggestions?
EDIT: i "release gas" (give up). this is too much hassle for no actual gains. other than bragging rights.
13.1.07
"what happened to grape soda?"
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I noticed that most of your picks are smaller distros based on larger distros. Unless you have a burning need that one of those smaller distros fills, I'd suggest picking one of the larger ones.
Picking a larger distro means that you have a larger community to draw from. And you can customize your larger distro so that it's like your smaller distro anyway.
In choosing a distro, I'd also suggest figuring out what you want in a distro. Do you want ease of use, or control, optimization, freedom, and so on?
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