SJ Cuthbertson

So, turns out that the downloadable ISO from fluxbuntu.org is broken (MD5 matches, so the problem’s on their end), or else I have three broken CD-burning applications, or two broken CD-burning drives. Occam’s-razorize THAT one. It also turns out that my laptop’s optical drive (or possibly BIOS) is a little iffy – I can’t boot off any LiveCDs, even ones that work in my PC.

I have worked out a potential means of fixing the laptop, though. What’s broken, I believe, is that I don’t have either of Gnome or K desktop managers installed, only XDM, which I think Fluxbox doesn’t really support. So I have a window manager with nothing behind the scenes to take control when I actually *click* on a menu item. If I can reinstall GDM or KDM, I might be OK, but without an optical drive or means of internet connectivity (also broken), I can only see one (comical) solution. Download the DPKG on another machine, and transfer via USB stick or floppy disk (!), then install locally. Great. I’m not even going to bother, I’ll just spend hours faffing when I could just be doing all my research analysis and report-writing elsewhere.

Result: I’ve installed MiKTeX on my XP desktop, and intend to ssh to pip.srcf for certain necessary operations. And now I’m going to get on and try to actually view computers as means again, rather than ends…