My computer died

[MustangGT]

After all, why should the drive that hosts the less well-behaved OS be the master?

I thought that the master was always the less-well-behaved entity in any real life relationship

[Brad Reddekopp]

True!

[Brad Reddekopp]

Got some jumpers today, so I'll be able to switch my drives around -- too busy to do it tonight, though, and I might wait until I get my Debian disks.

My wife and I needed to make a trip to a bigger town 45 minutes down the highway (Smithers) so, while we were there, I told a guy at an electronics shop there ("The Source By Circuit City") that I was looking for jumpers. He complained about how they don't give extra jumpers with hard drives before going in the back and finding a plastic box that contained a wealth of jumpers from old, dead hard drives. He gave me three. I offered to pay but he declined to take money for them.

[Dan Mac]

Dan, there is at least one Windows program that I'd really like to continue using -- Melody Assistant. In your opinion, is Wine the best Windows emulator for Windows? Have you had much experience with music creation/notation programs under Linux?

Wine is a pain in the ass, but with enough tinkering it can handle most windows executables and libraries. Personally, I like VMware, which is much smoother and actually allows you to run windows itself in a window. (without the gratuitous resource munching) The problem with VMware is that it is proprietary, thus requires a purchase rather than a free download, but worth it in my opinion.
http://www.vmware.com/

The other choice, as always, is finding a GNU public license equivalent program. I would guess there exists out there such a thing even without knowing what 'melody assistant' even does. Either way...

[Dan Mac]

Got some jumpers today, so I'll be able to switch my drives around -- too busy to do it tonight, though, and I might wait until I get my Debian disks.

The great thing about Debian is it's symbiotic relationship with the 'master servers' (sources.list). Think windows updates on steroids..keeping ALL of your software, not just the os itself, current is super duper easy. Your gonna want high speed ASAP, else you'll be confined to the rather limited and quickly dated cd content.
This is how simple it is to upgrade every package on your machine to the current version in debian.
apt-get -u upgrade.
which will give you back something like this:

# apt-get -u upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back
cpp gcc lilo
The following packages will be upgraded
adduser ae apt autoconf debhelper dpkg-dev esound esound-common ftp indent
ipchains isapnptools libaudiofile-dev libaudiofile0 libesd0 libesd0-dev
libgtk1.2 libgtk1.2-dev liblockfile1 libnewt0 liborbit-dev liborbit0
libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 libtiff3g libtiff3g-dev modconf orbit procps psmisc
29 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 5055B/5055kB of archives. After unpacking 1161kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

hit y, go get a coffee.
same goes for upgrading debian itself to the latest version.
apt-get -u dist-upgrade.

How much fucking around and financial kicks in the balls would it take to do all that in windows I wonder?

[Dan Mac]

I thought that the master was always the less-well-behaved entity in any real life relationship

I take it you don't know any D/s lifesylers

[MustangGT]

I offered to pay but he declined to take money for them.

What a softie! I would have charged you (*puts pinky at corner of mouth*) one... hundred... BILLION dollars!!! Mwahahahahaha!

/dr.evil

[MustangGT]

I thought that the master was always the less-well-behaved entity in any real life relationship

I take it you don't know any D/s lifesylers

Touche!

[Brad Reddekopp]

Dan, there is at least one Windows program that I'd really like to continue using -- Melody Assistant. In your opinion, is Wine the best Windows emulator for Windows? Have you had much experience with music creation/notation programs under Linux?

Wine is a pain in the ass, but with enough tinkering it can handle most windows executables and libraries. Personally, I like VMware, which is much smoother and actually allows you to run windows itself in a window. (without the gratuitous resource munching) The problem with VMware is that it is proprietary, thus requires a purchase rather than a free download, but worth it in my opinion.
http://www.vmware.com/

Hmm. For $189, I think I'd rather boot to Windows every now and then.

The other choice, as always, is finding a GNU public license equivalent program. I would guess there exists out there such a thing even without knowing what 'melody assistant' even does. Either way...

I've done a bit of searching and I found one package that appears to have similar functions to Melody Assistant. Of course, I won't know whether or not it's adequate to my needs until I get going with Linux.

I poked around a bit on the Melody Assistant forum and the authors of the program don't think it's feasible at this time to create a native Linux version but they're considering making a Windows version that's optimized for Wine.

MA (heh) is made by a small company (two brothers), not a big corporation, and they've created a unique and useful tool for musicians. It's a niche market.

[Brad Reddekopp]

I offered to pay but he declined to take money for them.

What a softie! I would have charged you (*puts pinky at corner of mouth*) one... hundred... BILLION dollars!!! Mwahahahahaha!

/dr.evil

I think he should have charged me something as a matter of principle. I didn't argue the point with him, though.

[Brad Reddekopp]

I got the dual boot thing working with Fedora. By switching the XP drive to slave and the Fedora drive to master, it works just fine. So, yes, the problem was that Windows wasn't playing nice. What a surprise...

[Brad Reddekopp]

I'm having some trouble getting the modem configuration right in Fedora. Can't get Fedora to activate the modem. I'll guess I'll have to shut down, open the case, and get the modem's model number so I can figure things out.

[Brad Reddekopp]

I'm going to go to Debian when my Debian disks arrive but I'm going to practise on Fedora.

[Brad Reddekopp]

Debian disks arrived today! About to format over Fedora.

[MustangGT]

Andrew! Youre in Hong Kong now? Hows life over there?