Damn you lightning

I’m cursing far too many things.  I really should be more positive, but this is just sad:

 OK, some of you know that a couple years ago, my house was stuck by lightning (or struck close enough to cause MASSIVE problems).  It went through basically every wire in the house. This was particularly bad since our network printer/fax has a phone line running to it.  this meant  that even though every computer was protected from the powerline as was the printer, it came in through the phone line and got into the network. Among the deceased devices were a few network cards, the printer itself, a switch, a router, a tv, two stereo systems, some phones and probably some more stuff I don’t want to remember. This time wasn’t as bad, but it still hurt the network. I’m pretty sure it got in the power lines and then got into the network through the switch in the basement. We were out another switch and lost one NIC thus far.  This kinda took me offline while we tried various components of the network and rewired the important computers back in. Gah.

On a more positive note, I installed Vida Linux on a virtual computer (Version 1.2.1 R2). I installed it back in version 1 also and was not impressed. I’ve used Gentoo since 2003 on an off. I loved the operating system but had problems with it. I went 64-bit when they just added the support and had terrible application support. It also takes one hell of a long time to compile Gnome on Gentoo, so that’s a lot of downtime waiting. But I loved it every time I compiled it (I actually compiled it from a network install on my laptop once. It ran as well as I could expect, but I couldn’t get it to recognize 1024×768 and that caused major annoyances when my laptop does not stretch the video). Vida Linux is based on Gentoo, but it uses Anaconda to install Stage 3 on your machine (for those who aren’t as Linux savvy (not that I am, really), that means easy install of precompiled software. That’s a lot faster). The install was very painless.  I think it took approximately a half hour to forty-five minutes for it to partition and install everything available. That’s pretty good (note, i’m using the free download version, not the "complete" pay version). I like Gnome and there was a quite pretty background to greet me when I logged in.

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