Paul Henman at henman.ca

When I bought a new motherboard for my PC (an ASUS P5Q), I didn’t realise it only had one IDE connector. That’s OK for the DVD burner and the hard drive caddy (which I’ve used for some years to simplify dual booting: one hard drive for Windows and one for Linux) but I’ve got a few more IDE drives that I’d like to hook up too.

Fortunately I found some cheap IDE-SATA converter cards, which meant I could connect my other IDE drives to the SATA ports … once I beat the converters into submission! They are simply a small breadboard with an IDE connector on one side and SATA power+data ports on the other. There’s also a switch and jumper which have to be set in conjunction, so there’s really only two possible settings. Somehow it took a few days and a lot of frustration before it decided to play nicely – I have no idea why it suddenly decided to work, but I’m glad it did and I’m very careful not to upset it. (Note: if you have one of these converters, remember you have to plug in the IDE power as well as the SATA power.)

Yesterday I used HD Clone to copy my Windows XP installation from a 40GB IDE drive to the main 500Gb SATA drive. It took a couple of hours but was completely painless. I removed the IDE drive (from the caddy) and booted in to XP with no problems.

Today I thought I’d install Fedora as a second operating system (dual boot) on the 500Gb SATA drive. I installed Fedora 10 Beta a few days ago (on a spare IDE drive) and it worked fine, but I thought it would be safer to use the stable Fedora 9 for my secondary o/s. (You can tell it’s not going to end well, can’t you?) The install went fine; it knew XP was already installed and so it set up the dual boot selection. I removed the install DVD, rebooted, and told it to start Linux … which it did, but then all I got was an error message from the monitor saying it couldn’t display the image! I’ve tried auto-adjust and manually changing the monitor’s settings; I’ve tried getting to just a command line login prompt (in case it’s an X config problem) but nothing’s working.

It’s not the end of the world; it’s certainly not top of my To Do list (finding a job is!) and I might just wait for Fedora 10 to be released because I’ve read it has some nifty new hardware support including AHCI. (I would go to 10 Beta now but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to upgrade it or if it’ll have to be reinstalled once 10 is fully released.) If I absolutely have to use Linux, I’ve still got the Fedora 10 Beta install (in a disk caddy) so I could just slot it in.

One thing I still have to deal with is sending a dead 250Gb SATA drive back to Maxtor … before the warranty expires would be a good idea!

According to Wikipedia’s list of events for today, Linux was “born” on this day in 1991 – version 0.01 of the kernel is 15 years old!

I’m very grateful to Linus and everyone involved in all aspects of the Open Source movement and free software development.

[Remember: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'" - Richard Stallman, FSF.]

Unfortunately now I have to return to my battle with our WinXP laptop.

eWeek.com reports:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reaffirmed a pair of patents held by Microsoft related to its File Allocation Table system, which allows for the use of certain file names in its Windows operating system as well as in many electronic devices and forms of removable media.

The consequence? The GPL issued by the Free Software Foundation forbids the distribution of programs that use patented technologies necessitating payment of any royalties, ergo Linux will have to drop support for FAT, same as they had to for NTFS. It won’t prevent individuals from creating separate packages that you can install (e.g. the excellent Linux-NTFS Project), but Microsoft will no doubt continue to crow lie about how hard it is to install Linux.

Someone please deal with Microsoft’s monopoly and do the world a favour!

I’m upgrading our server this afternoon, so our blog, website, photo gallery and email will all be down. I haven’t done this upgrade before so I don’t know how long it will take, but I hope it will all be back up later today.

I’ll post updates to the site journal (here).

Update: Everything’s back up except the photo gallery and outgoing email; that’s Friday’s challenge.

Update #2: After a lot of frustration (and input from ~20 people) we finally fixed the email. Just the photo gallery to do now then…

Update #3: photo gallery is fixed too.

From the new (Jan 2006) edition of Linux Journal – Build a Home Terabyte Backup System Using Linux .

/drools