A really bad idea

I have to confess to making a rather bad mistake this afternoon, and it’s a little embarrassing.

I swapped the hard drive in my rtorrent slave, taking out a rather noisy 20Gb drive and replacing it with the 40Gb 5400rpm Samsung drive that has, until recently, been the guinea pig for my ancient 100Mhz laptop. I intended to reinstall Arch on the system, then flip-flopped and started to install Crux, and then finally just grabbed the Ubuntu 8.10 disc and spun it up.

And since the lower half of the screen is obscured, I went ahead and installed the full system without switching to a command-line install. I couldn’t see the options to pick, so I just hit return to get the thing started. And so I began a three-hour installation of Ubuntu Gnome.

On a 750Mhz machine.

With only 128Mb.

So anyway, you can see where this is going. When I finally booted into the fresh system I realized in full how awful a mistake I had made. It can’t even show the Applications menu without paging out to swap, caching all the menu icons. Just downloading and installing updates to Intrepid was taking something like an hour.

So anyway, I’m back to installing something a little more sane for that machine. Reminder to self: Think. It doesn’t take much effort, and I save myself hours in the process. 😯