Arranger (Monday, 2010 September 13)
Hmm, I’m getting close to needing to keep a list of what titles I’ve already used and which ones I haven’t.
Sorry I haven’t written much lately (6 days without a post??). I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer lab with some students, trying to do miscellaneous repairs/survey stuff. For example, we turned all the desks around, so the workstations face outward instead of inside, so that the instructor can look at all of them at a glance. Also, there was one computer that wasn’t booting — some problem with NTLDR — so I used this as an excuse to throw Ubuntu on it. Or, tried to anyhow.
So, get ready for a shock. These computers are Windows XP and they run with 128 MB of RAM. But trying to install Ubuntu off a USB stick requires at least 192 MB. Stock Ubuntu just died horribly (OOM’ing processes left and right) when trying to run "live". I didn’t even try to install it, things were just going so slow. So in the meantime I’ve been using my precious bandwidth to download other ISOs. XUbuntu installed (using the text-only installer) but it takes forever to start up, and it runs a bit like a dog. (As far as I can tell, the CPU is the bottleneck. These are P2/P3 class machines.) [Edit: today it ran fine.] So next I’ve been downloading LUbuntu (since Fluxbuntu is no longer an option?), something called Slitaz, something called Crunchbang, Elive, something called Absolute, and the newest version of Puppy Linux. The problem is trying to install on a USB 1.0 port takes forever.
Additionally, when I haven’t been at the lab ("my lab"), I’ve been working on my "scheme of work", the year-long plan of what I will be teaching when. The first one was really hard; after that they got easier. But it still entails reading through the textbooks we’re going to be using, which are not bereft of errors.