It’s AAALLIIIVVE!!!

Nothing like posting on Thursday some details about what happened a week ago, eh?
Well, one of the things I did on my absurdly productive weekend was bring yawl back from the dead. Some may rememeber that the poor Dell suffered a fatal drive crash back in December. Since then it’s been sitting, forlorn, silent. I had actually purchased the replacement 160gig drive already, but just never got around to putting it in.
Well this weekend provided the final kick in the pants to finish the upgrade. I realized that yawl was the host to the external drives I use to back up our colocated server. With yawl down, I couldn’t run the backups. THAT needed to change.
So open went the case (Yay for Dell creating -really- nice SFF (small form factor) cases. This case just opens right up with two button pushes, and the drive pops out via a simple plastic clip). In went the new drive, and back together it went. Total surgery time – perhaps 15 minutes.
The next problem of course, what to install on it? Since I’ve had Windows on clipper for the last 6 months or so, I haven’t been using a Linux desktop. Before that I had been running Debian etch with KDE as my desktop. For the new ‘yawl’, I decided I needed to get in on what is now the most popular free distro – that being Ubuntu. This distro is primarily Gnome based, which is something I’ve been avoiding for quite a while, but I figure I should give it a run for a bit and get at least mildly familiar with it, even though it doesnt’ match my preferences.
The install went perfectly, with an excellent clean installer (came right up in X and walked me through the setup). Rebooted, and lo! A clean desktop with sound and graphics all working perfectly.
I won’t go into a more detailed rundown of it quite yet, but it’s good to have it back. I was able to mount my external drives and run my backups, letting everyone breathe a little easier!
At any rate, we happily welcome ‘yawl’ back into the planet-geek system farm!