How do people find time for blogging

As I was going through my profile on Orkut, I came across a link I had added onto my “About me” column, which was this blog. I came to know that I had posted the last post of this blog in December 2007, almost a quarter year before. I’m pretty amazed by people who blog everyday. How do these guys find time? Or more appropriately how do these people remember that they should write a blog? Anyway, with the usual oath that I would blog more regularly, I start of with this blog’s theme.

I faced a real challenge this weekend. The challenge of repairing one of my pals’ old IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop which runs on a meek Intel Pentium 2 Processor @ just 366 MHz and 192 MB SDRAM. This is the oldest system that has come to my hands ever since I have accumulated a substantial knowledge about Computers and hardware. I initially thought of installing Windows, sorry Windoze XP on it because my friend claimed that it had once run XP. So, after several attempts to procure the XP CD, I finally got one and slid it into the laptop’s cdrom drive. I had an empty harddisk of ~ 5gb because, I had once tried to install Debian onto it, and only after formatting the partitions that I realised that the laptop didn’t have an ethernet card (which is quite important when installing debian packages from the internet). So, coming back to the XP installation, I was greeted by the setup screen but when I tried starting the partitioner in the XP cd, the system crashed and I was shown the familiar BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

So, XP was ruled out and which was good news because having XP installed on it would make the system slower. So, I tried many light-weight Linux distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, as both use Xfce as the desktop environment instead of KDE and Gnome. Both weren’t satisfying and then I stumbled upon gOS (g for Green or Good), which is supposedly a derivative of Ubuntu, my favourite distro ever. So, I installed gOS onto the laptop and it booted pretty quickly and in front of me was a stunning Mac OSX type desktop. I immediately noticed that the desktop environment was Enlightenment, which I had once used with a distro named elive. It was sparkling and cute and the main challenge was to make the sound work. After several pains, I got the sound card working. After that, was this really tedious task of installing certain softwares like mplayer, xmms, scilab, frozen-bubble. It was tedious because I had to hunt down dependencies of each of these softwares in my PC, copy them to my usb pen drive and then install them on the laptop. After several attempts, I’ve got everything setup perfectly and now, everything works seamlessly.

My next aim is to connect my PC and the laptop via a USB host-host connector, so that I can access the internet in my laptop, through the connection in my PC. I know it’s pretty ambitious, but let me keep my fingers crossed.

Hopefully, I will blog the next time from the laptop.

And today’s quote!

Go linux and opensource and live life as you wish.