A quick note before I make another post about why the other day was awesome:

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; what I learned makes it kinda rule for non-X11 things). So I tried 64-bit Ubuntu — which had the same problem, but fortunately worked just as well as 32-bit in terms of proprietary functionality (nVidia drivers, Flash, etc). Currently sitting on 64-bit Fedora 8; but it’s not apt to stay too long.

(Mostly, I’m coming to suspect it’s the ACPI — I’ve tried the nVidia beta driver to no avail)

Meanwhile….

I’m downgrading to XP on cosette.

For all intents and purposes, I did so about a week and a half ago — just booted my old XP partition. Hey, sudden burst of comfort, speed, and it worked right. Huzzah. But then I came to remember why I tried Vista in the first place — this old partition is starting to feel “dirty”. I need a reinstall.

The reason I hate reinstalling Windows, of course, is installing the software I like. If ever there were a major plus to Linux, it’s package management; go out, grab your favorite software, all with one command and be up and running just-like-that. I was able to switch distros like mad recently and it shows. You just can’t do that in Windows.

Until I went by the CSUA office today and was told of a magical XP image, with all the greatest hits installed. I grabbed it to my iPod and am now munging my partition tables but good (ntfsresize -P --force --force /dev/sda2) to throw the image over my Vista install, killing it forever. It’ll run overnight. And if it doesn’t work, I’ve got my trustier XP CD sitting here.

Meanwhile, I’m pondering putting a fresh install of Leopard on marius, my old Mac mini.

It’s the time of year to clean house, digitally.

And in case you’re wondering and like my naming scheme of Les Miserables characters; I’m writing this on enjolras, my MacBook Pro.