Well, that was probably the worst saturday I've had in a very long time. My sinuses kept me horizontal most of the day, and finally began to get better around 22:00, long after the day was already spent. Heck, they're not completely better yet.. Anyhow, I went out to India Garden to have some Saag Paneer around midnight, hoping (correctly) that it would help clear me out. On the way back, I was reminded of a task I'd been assigned at work, and, well, I'm here now. Anyhow, now that I know what I'm doing with it, the next times will go much more smoothly -- it's looking now like the basic idea was sound, and I'll finish up with the execution on monday. Heck, if I wern't going to a Renfest tomorrow, and if I had my laptop so I'd have more than 4 songs to listen to here, I'd just pull an all-nighter here and finish it up. But, alas, I probably should be heading home.. I'm not by any means as healthy as I normally am, and despite how nice it is to be at work when there's nobody around to distract me, I should probably be asleep, with the newer, non-nasty-old NyQuil in my stomach making sure things don't get too nasty.

Oh, yes, in case you have an IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop or close relative, and are converting it from a singleboot WinXPHome system to a dual boot with Linux, one neat quirk about the 'factory reinstall' option in the CMOS Utility (well, the fancy one -- there are actually two) is that it will just install itself into the first partition it sees that it thinks is an OS partition. So... first do a normal install of RedHat9 (or whatever), partitioning the drives so you have:

root partition: 30G (or whatever) ext3 filesystem (mark as / in disk druid) swap: 1G real root partition: 40G (or whatever) ext3 filesystem (mark as /blah)

Do a dummy install of Linux from the CDROM, making sure it installs GRUB into the boot sector of the HD. Make it small -- this is going to be wiped out, but the IBM restoration utility is nosy and it needs at least a non-empty partition and you need grub to make things easier later. After it finishes, reboot back into the fancy CMOS utility, and start the factory settings reinstall. It'll boot into it's canned Win98 and do its magic, but each time it tries to reboot, it'll fall into GRUB. Give GRUB the following incantation to continue to boot into windows each time it needs:

rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 boot

(spaces ARE important there) After 5 or 6 reboots, and all sorts of crazy IBM scripting (that, somehow, reminds me of installing OS/2, ages ago), WinXP will be back on your system, with all the drivers and custom configuration there again, except this time, it'll just be in the first 30G of disk, and you'll have some space for Linux and GRUB installed. Shut back down, and reinstall Linux from CD, this time using disk druid to mark the third partition you made (probably hda3) as the root partition, and tell GRUB how to boot Windows.

Some things I'm wondering -- where exactly is the thinkpad keeping it's install image of WinXP? If it's on the disk, I wonder why Linux doesn't see any partitions for it. If not, does the X31 have some additional storage somewhere? Hmmmm...

Oh, yes, I have several more interesting news articles I think you'd like to read, but it'll have to wait, because I'm sleepy and, with the distraction of the actual work I'm doing, it's now almost 03:30. I *really* must be going..