Our company President’s computer took a complete shit on us this morning. Honestly, I’m happy that it finally did. In the last month I have formatted it and repaired it twice. It’s a Windows XP desktop. I could not for the life of me figure out what was wrong with it. Nothing remained stable for very long before a crop of system errors popped up rendering the operating system useless. It could be bad ram, could be something on the hard drive, or maybe even something on the motherboard…I don’t know and I’m glad that I did not have to worry about it any longer.

I ordered a new computer for him today. In the meantime I was able to get a Slax live-cd running on it. Slax wasn’t my first choice though. I thought that I would just stick an Ubuntu Gutsy disc in it and let him run live without installing anything. That was the laziest approach that I could think of since my Gutsy CD was sitting on top of my computer. Unfortunately, Gnome was just to damn slow on his computer. That’s when I moved on to Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. However, those were a little too geeky looking for someone who has never used Linux before. I didn’t think it was well suited for him. Those distros are light and fast but it’s more of a functional desktop rather than a pretty one. That really didn’t matter much to me but I didn’t want my boss thinking that this was what Linux looked like. I wanted to leave a good impression.

After I crashed and burned a bit, I stomped out the fire and hit the ‘net. I landed over at Slax.org. Ah, Slax…I had forgotten about you. I haven’t dabbled with Slax for a pretty long time. It has to be one of the fastest if not the fastest KDE based distros out there. Slax is light, and takes a modular approach to adding software. It boots pretty quickly and once the KDE desktop loads up it fucking smokes for a live-cd. I was shocked. I fainted soon afterwards. Live-cd’s aren’t usually that fast, at least in my experience they haven’t been. I’ve tried quite a few of them over the years. I use Knoppix on a regular basis as a recovery cd at work. Knoppix moves along well but no where near as fast as Slax. Knoppix is also what I use to judge other live distros. Perhaps that’s not fair since Knoppix takes the kitchen sink approach to live distros. On the other hand, that’s what makes Knoppix so darn handy as a recovery disc.

I didn’t get a chance to get an evaluation from my boss after he left for home today. I did walk by his office periodically through out the day and I noticed that he was sitting behind his computer. Of course, he might have discovered the game Patience, I don’t know. Perhaps he wasn’t working at all.

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