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…

(FYI, I’ve been running a heavily bastardised *buntu-based linux installation on my oldish Dell C640 for some time. I’ve messed around with the packaging way too much to call it Ubuntu or Kubuntu – indeed, at various times I’ve tried not just the GNOME and KDE packages, but Xfce as well (Xubuntu), and then settled on Fluxbox with GDM underneath. This was before the concept of Fluxbuntu existed. After spending a lot of time yesterday customising the Fluxbox interface, I succeeded (somehow) in removing all display managers. I then put XDM on, and now Fluxbox comes up, but without functional menus… so I can’t even launch a virtual terminal. Ah well…)

My longer term aim is to actually build a linux install from the ground up – I want Fluxbox, but I probably don’t want a lot of what comes with Fluxbuntu. This might signal my first change from *buntu for some years…

Oh yeah, and to conclude my previous post, Airset is vastly overengineered for my needs, but does sync well to Palm devices, so I’m using that. I plan to set up some complicated iCal sharing at some point between Airset, facebook, Google Calendar/Mail, and other webapps, which could be quite cool.