reinstalling the OS(es)
 

What a fun day... we had one of our key people retire last week (good for her!) but now I'm in a hard spot... as it turns out, I've not needed windows at home since '97 and not needed it here at work since '00... until last Friday. So I used a lab machine to get thru the day, and today I've had the joy of installing it on my poor desktop machine. On top of that, WinXP was kind enough to hose my Linux install, so I got to reinstall that too :)

Funny thing is that it took longer to get XP installed (never mind all the reboots) that it did to download, install, and configure Debian.

For the players keeping track at home, 3 reboots for windows to get to a useable desktop login prompt (then many more for service packs, updates, installing antivirus, visual studio, etc). For the Debian install, one reboot after base install, plus one at lunch to get my custom kernel up and running.

How are you sharing files between Windows and Debian? Or are you sharing files?

3 reboots? That's not bad. Last time I did a Windows install, it was a whole-day operation. I'd bring the machine up, perform one or two items, then reboot ... go get a sandwich, drink, snack, or whatever ... perform one or two ops, then reboot. All day.

But that hasn't been for a while. I've been essentially M$-free for 6 or 8 months now. Mac OS X on the laptop, SuSe 9.1 on the desktop. Too easy.

Sharing files between the 2 systems is easy - my home directory is on a server exported as both a NFS and a Samba share. So accessing it from either system is easy.

djmcmath - the 3 reboots for windows was to just get thru the dang install :)

With XP and Linux on the same computer, isn't it easier to share files if the XP is XP home? I ask because I would think XP home would be more likely to be set up on a Fat32 file system than NTFS.

lol, Windows has gotten plain stupid. Who inserts that middle-boot, anyway? I mean, ok I'll give them one boot at the beginning, so you can boot cleanly off the CD/DVD to do the install, and one more at the end so you can boot into the new kernel. But what's the middle-boot for? lol, silly M$. :)