How touching that some people were concerned enough to inquire as to why I was offline the entire weekend. :) I actually took the weekend and dived into being a nerd. In the interest of averting a disaster, I'm replacing my 5 year old hard drive with a newer one, a shiny new 250GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA NCQ. Really great deal at newegg, it was only $137!
The nice part about getting a new drive is that you can work on building it without the pressure of needing to get everything up now... instead, you can work on it for a while, then plug in the old drive and be back up right where you left off--fully loaded and ready to be productive, which is exactly what I did this morning. So, what was I doing that took the better part of a weekend and still isn't finished?
I want to get a seamless Windows / Linux (Gentoo) dual-boot so that I can hopefully spend more time in Linux than I do now (which is none on my main rig). I also will be re-evaluating tools like Opera and Thunderbird that allow use of the same email archive in both OSes on a shared FAT32 drive; without that, alternating is never going to work. I ran into some fun issues with Linux, including dealing with the SATA driver, dealing with a kernel bug with framebuffering, and getting the Matrox drivers installed for my Parhelia (it would help if their script properly detected that I am using a 2.6 kernel and built the correct kernel module... dur). Anyway, Windows is operational and some apps are installed, and Linux is getting there, the big problem being something wrong with pyopengl not compiling... but I am confident I can overcome it. Just not now when I need to be productive. :)
So, that's it. Readers: any advice about cross-platform cross-compatible tools that I should consider for easy alternating between Windows and Linux?
Boy, you did exactly what I plan since 1,5 but never found out time for make my home station dual boot. I hope I will really find time for it in the some future. Wish you best with your research and migration :-)
I wondered why you were gone, but you didn't mention it when we spoke, and I didn't want to bring it up in case it was something... less than happy. :)
There are three things that make my transitions between Windows and Linux easier. I started posting all of my bookmarks to http://del.icio.us/ and use the Foxylicious plugin to import them into Firefox and keep them synchronized between both partitions. This solution requires that all my bookmarks be public and does not allow you to share special URLs like bookmarklets, but does provide me some interesting ways to view my bookmarks, which makes it worth it for me.
Secondly, I have two partitions called LIMBO and WONDERFUL. They take up exactly half of both my 80GB drives, and besides using them for storing games, which are okay to be lost (hey, it's FAT after all), I use them for temporarily storing files that I know I'll want next time I reboot to the other OS. The partitions are big, so I won't ever run into a file and have to worry about splitting it up so it'll fit.
Thirdly, off-loading my e-mail to Gmail has been pretty helpful as it's accessible everywhere and I personally like the interface. If webmail isn't for you or you think Google is scary, then this hint isn't for you. :)
Good luck with the new hard drive! Sounds like a great buy.