Unnecessary Twaddle

I'm not usually one for unnecessary twaddle, but it's been a while since I last wrote about what's going on in the lab, so here it goes:

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Synopsis: Preparations of the new host system for LFS are taking longer than expected.

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Well, the Doctor would have been right about using PCLinuxOS 2009.2 as the host system for our next try at this except for one thing:  connecting this system to the lab's network is verboten (under pain of slow agnozing death at the hands of Lady Frankenputer, whom I may have mentioned is jealous of any use of bandwidth which might cost her a prize on the Daily Neopets Challenge), and we don't have the repositories for all the programs we will need to properly outfit it as a host.

Enter our old, trusty, reliable copy of PCLinuxOS 2007 (for which we do have the repositories on DVD).  This presents one other small problem, though:  the largest drive on the target system is not large enough to hold the repository (no, it's not set up to be used directly from the DVDs, more's the pity...) so now I'm left pondering what to do to get round this.

As I see it now, I have a couple of alternatives:

• I could repartition the drives temporarily for long enough to configure the host, then go back and restore them to a configuration more suited to building LFS.  This sounds like more work than I need to do, though.

• I could simply attach an external USB drive (we have a couple of small ones lying about that could easily store the repository files with room to spare), mount it as needed, and then remove it after the host is ready to proceed.  This seems to me to be the way to go.

So... tomorrow or day after, we will once again take up the challenge.  Perhaps by next week sometime we will be ready to make our second attempt at this grand experiment.

Oh, yes!  Lest I forget, the new laptop is wonderful!  It still has Windows XP on it (and it will stay there through the remaining months of the warranty period), but it is a very  well-behaved machine - very fast, very stable, very predictable and reliable.  I've already live-booted it with Linux a time or two just to see how it's going to go, and I can't wait - it's blisteringly fast from the Live CD, so it's bound to really fly running from the hard drive.

Now I know that some of my readers will no doubt ascribe the recent lack of activity here to my wasting time playing with the new computer.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I'm merely taking some time to digest the lessons learned to improve our chances on the next go-round. Really.  Our recent acquisition of "Plants vs. Zombies" has very little to do with it.  Really.  (Now... I really must go plant more Melonpults!)