Thursday, May 10, 2001

OK, lots and lots to talk about.

I tried to get AtheOS installed on Lady last night (I really should put up bio pages for each of my computers, so people will know what I mean when I say things like “I brought home Tramp tonight”). That was a trip. First, I kept getting corrupt boot disks, and then the installation would hang partway through (Lady has its hard drive divided into two pieces: One for Windows 98 and another for BeOS; I decided to install AtheOS over the BeOS installation). After five or six hung installs, I just re-booted in and re-started the installation from the point I was at before, without re-formatting the partition beforehand. And with that, AtheOS completed installing itself. It took another hour or so of wrestling with GRUB, the bootmanager, and then I could boot AtheOS and Windows properly.

AtheOS is minimal, and definitely not ready for “regular users,” but it is functional. It feels a lot like a Unix OS, just with a BeOS shell running on top of it. There’s no “Start” menu or anything like that; it’s just a basic set of icons and simple GUI apps (a text editor, a processor usage meter, etc.). I even managed to get the system on my network before crashing into bed at 3:00 a.m.

It has no modem support yet, so I’d need to set up another system as the gateway on the network, and Be just won’t let me do that yet. So, it looks like I won’t be getting truly online with AtheOS any time soon. There’s also no CD-ROM support, or really any sound support whatsoever. So, it’s definitely limited, but…heck, it’s a hobby OS. What should I expect?

I’ve been tracking down AtheOS software and websites, and I think I’ve actually come across pretty much all of them. There are about half a dozen sites that have anything to do with AtheOS. So, just to keep track of them, I’ve put together Kamidake, an attempt at a comprehensive list of software and websites related to AtheOS.

My sister and her daughters are coming over to our house tonight, so I’ll get a chance to see them, and hopefully complete some fixes to their website.

That’s it for now. More to come, I’m sure.

Writing Thoughts

Thu

Well, I managed to get about an hour’s worth of writing done on Wine last night. I wrote the first half of the first drafts of two scenes. The first scene occurs in episode 2, in which Masaki gives Sarah a physical check-up. The second scene is the climax of the series in episode 6, starting with Larsson entering Sarah’s room to tell her that she’s going to be re-conditioned. I finished writing that last scene at the point at which Sarah is just about to open the heavy wooden doors and leave the facility.

While this was no great task, I was pleased that I actually sat down and spent my allotted one hour writing. I’m making progress, and it’s all because I’m learning to say “no” to easy, convenient time-wasters and just sitting down and writing.