I still have a few things to work out, like putting my own image up in the corner there, but it looks like it works all in all, and it even keeps the old Blogger permalinks (because I know you all have every single one of my posts bookmarked so as to forever capture my deathless prose).

Ever since Tony Stark brought out his clone of Thor, and got him to kill Goliath during Marvel Comics’ Civil War, I’ve been waiting for Thor return and, well, pretty much say this. Looking forward to Iron Man getting his Iron Butt smacked.

Incidentally, anyone waiting for a gardening update can blame Motorola’s Phone Tools for the delay. First, it claimed to have copied the pictures I took over to my computer, yet they no longer exist, and now it can’t seem to see my phone any more. I shall try taking photos tomorrow with my actual camera.

I have not been having fun the past few days. It turns out that plain-old-ordinary paracetamol isn’t that good against my migranes. Kind of annoying, especially when you’ve run out of anything else. Yesterday I had to venture out into the nasty bright sunshine (even though it was snowing at the time!) to get proper medication. That’s helped a bit, but it’s still been unable to completely kill it dead.

In those moments when I’ve been unable to sleep, waiting for the next time I can take medication, I’ve been upgrading my Linux distro to Ubuntu. It’s being touted as particularly easy to use, but installing it was a bit of an adventure.

It all started when the power went down Tuesday morning, and my aging 233 Debian Linux machine wouldn’t reboot. And unfortunately that’s the gateway and router to my home network, so I’d be off the ‘net until it got fixed.

The original plan was just to do a brain transplant to the shell of my 450 MHz machine, which had had its brain moved to a new 1GHz machine, and was now empty. This went well, only X Windows didn’t understand there was a new graphics card to deal with, and there was the issue of discovering which ethernet card was now considered “eth0″ and which “eth1″.

Now, I could have kept the Debian distro, and just worked through these issues myself, but I thought it was time for a change, and I had two of these Ubunto Linux CD sets; for some reason it seemed that installing from scratch would be easier than delving through configuration files – the idea being that the installer would work all this stuff for me.

This turned out to be a mistake.

The basic installation went fine, except it wouldn’t boot up after the install, complaining about not being able to access the hard drive via DMA. No real hints in the information on the CD – I tried a few things suggested, but nothing that worked. It’s incredibly fortunate that the Ubuntu set comes with a live CD – a version of Linux that works entirely from the CD. It’s especially fortunate that the live CD enabled my machine to get to the ‘net, so I could find out exactly what was going on, and what I needed to do about it (add “ide=nodma” to the boot parameters, as it happens).

That took a number of reboots and reinstalls. And when you consider that this all took place between me hiding my head in a dark room, only emerging when it just got too bad, I can’t sleep, and it’s not time for my medication yet, you get an idea of how much fun this all was. Part of the problem with my migranes is that my thought processes go abit askew, so Being On The Net Again was gaining rather more importance than it probably should, so Getting Ubuntu Working seemed terribly, terribly necessary.

So eventually, ide=nodma works and it reboots. It then asks if I want to upgrade to the latest version. “Sure”, thinks I. Only that goes wrong, and it gets into this wierd loop where it was setting the keyboard to the right country, then doing something else, doing the keyboard again, and around and around. So another install.

So now it all boots up, but Ubuntu doesn’t seem to notice I have a serial mouse – even though the Live CD did. Operating the Gnome desktop without a mouse is rather interesting. And the xf86cfg program that was allegedly going to fix that gave me keyboard replacements for the mouse that didn’t work.

So, given I’m an experienced Linux bloke, I thought to edit the configuration file manually – but Ubuntu doesn’t set up a root (a.k.a superuser) account like I’m used to. That was an interesting digression, as I had to hit the Ubuntu forums again (still without my mouse, and no Lynx (text-only browser)). Turns out Ubuntu doesn’t think you should log into root, instead using a “sudo” setup, where selected users can temporarily gain root-like powers where needed. Presumably that makes things more safe and secure (for example, you’re less likely to have a root window open that allows you to accidentally delete the entire filesystem when you just meant to clear a single directory).

However, eventually I found out how the “sudo” setup worked, edited XF86Config to use a serial mouse, one final reboot, and now I’ve got a working Ubuntu! It even had a working connection to the Internet, although I couldn’t get the second network card (the one connected to my network) to work at the same time. But now, with Internet Power™, I could connect to the Ubuntu IRC channel, and get info (specifically, remove the gateway IP address on my internal network card, which means my external card gets used for all outgoing traffic).

The final thing to do was to set up internet connection sharing so my network can view the outside world too. Again the Ubuntu IRC channel came up with the answer: Firestarter. An incredibly easy to use application that sets up a Linux firewall, including setting up connection sharing. So now I can type this in on my Windows 2000 machine, and it’ll go through Ubunto and to the Internet. Woo!

The other fun thing about Firestarter is that it has a window that shows all the firewall hits – all the stuff trying to get into my system. This is showing me quite graphically just how important it is to have some kind of firewall setup these days – I’ve not been connected a day and I had pages and pages of machines attempting to connect to various obscure ports on my machine. The odds are that the vast majority of those are compromised Windows machines that have been infected by viruses and now act as remote drones for the hackers, attempting to infect yet more machines. And many of those machines are also probably working as spambots, spewing out thousands of spam emails.

Moral of the story? Get a firewall, and virus checker.

I’d rant on about how it’s all the fault of Windows and its numerous security holes, but this post is enormous enough as it is

Annoyingly, I still can’t seem to shake this headache