I’ve been writing a column for National Review on the upcoming Shuttle launch, and reviewing CEV system requirements. Busy.

I’ve been thinking that a good way to make my laptop dual boot without messing with the current Windows installation would be to install a Linux distro on an external USB drive. Two questions:

Are there any problems with this (assuming that I can boot off a USB port) and are there any external drives that get their power from the USB port (so I don’t have to find a power socket to use it)?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, the search word I was missing was “portable.” There do seem to be some available that run off the USB port.

[Update a couple minutes later]

It seems to me that the cool thing about this is that you could boot from anyone’s computer into your own system, as long as the machine was bootable from USB.

I got in all right last night, but my laptop’s hard drive is dying (wish I’d known that before I left–I would have brought my other one). I’m posting this from work, but won’t be able to do much of that, so posting may be light this week, until I get back to Florida Friday night.

Back to LA for another week. I may check in tonight.

The carpenters are here today with some final cabinet installation issues, and the pool pump died, so I’ve been pulling the old one, finding a new one, and replacing it, before the summer mustard algae in south Florida crawls over the coping, creeps into our bedroom and smothers us in our slumber.

On a red eye. I’m going out to dinner, then getting on the plane, getting in about six tomorrow morning, east coast time, so probably no posting until tomorrow, if then.

I’ll be in LA all week, starting this evening. I’m about to leave for the airport, so no more posting until tonight, if then. Be good in the various comments sections.

For those few of you who are fascinated/horrified by my computer travails, here’s the current status.

After removing Open Office and a Fortran compiler to resolve some otherwise unresolvable (at least by me) dependency issues, I finished the upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 4 via yum update (at least I think I did–how do I know?). I rebooted, and it rebooted. I haven’t attempted to reinstall Open Office yet, so I don’t know if that will work, but flush with seeming victory over the machine, I decided to push my luck and go from Core 4 to Core 5.

Continue reading Fedora Update Update (Part N) →

Latest update on the Fedora upgrade saga:

Error: missing dep: libebook.so.8 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libedataserver.so.3 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libdb_cxx-4.2.so for pkg openoffice.org-libs
Error: missing dep: /lib/security/pam_loginuid.so for pkg openssh-server
Error: missing dep: gcc for pkg gcc-g77

Why is yum telling me this? Why doesn’t it just go out get the packages and fix it?

[Update about 11:15 AM EDT]

Continue reading Missing Dependencies →

OK, I got through the update, but got the following error messages at the end:

Continue reading New Fedora Update Problem →