I come up with projects at the worst times, sometimes.

When we were preparing for our move from Cascadia to Arapaho, I got the silly notion that I really needed to update my college football database (which included incorporating all of the scores in c college football history).

Now we’re buying a house, and I’m working diligently on getting all of my old computers back up and running in the post-XP world. This means Linux, which means learning a whole lot about Linux. It wasn’t something I set out to do. Rather, I was working on setting up a backup MediaPC and it became apparent that Windows 7 simply wasn’t going to run on it adequately (for reasons unknown, the specs are almost the same as the primary Media PC, which runs it fine). So I installed Linux and got this whole ball rolling.

Right now I am stuck on a Thinkpad T42p. One that has some hardware flaw, to boot. It’s not easy to figure out what I would do with it if I got it working, but I can’t stop trying to get it to work. My preferred Linux distro (brand) won’t install. I can get SUSE and Fedora to install but I can’t get the video files working on it. I can install from a LiveCD where I will have video but not full network capability. It’s really driving me crazy.

And I sort of suspect that it will end up like those desktops I meticulously worked on for weeks. I got them working, finally, then realized what pieces of crap they were and dismantled them and threw them out the next week. This computer is technically weaker than those, though it’s a laptop and my standards aren’t very good. Theoretically, either a video-less networked machine or a networkless video machine could be useful somewhere. But I am hard-minded about getting both of them working. So I’m scanning distro-watch for anything that’s not Ubuntu-based* (which won’t load), polished enough to have networking capability, but not so polished and professional that they leave the video decoders off.

* – Ubuntu is the #1 Linux distro out there, and is really quite good. So good, in fact, that dozens of other distros use the exact same underlying code. That way, you can use their wonderful software bank and have access to a lot more software and its ease-of-use. My favorite distro is Mint, which is Ubuntu-based but better for this reason and that. But all of the Ubuntu-based ones use that Ubuntu installer that won’t work in this particular machine.