Plantagenet Penguinista

Po: a machine to replace an existing Windows XP box which mostly displays slideshows. The existing XP box contracted a virus which doesn't seem to do much destructive but does axe anything even vaguely to do with the Win32 “shell” (loose use of the term: CMD.EXE ) including downloading virus scanner database updates. The machine does not often enjoy an Internet connection so presumably was infected from somebody's Flash USB stick. No problems. Install XP on a replacement machine with a 30% faster (& dual-core) CPU, twice as much RAM & PS/2 sockets (the original Dell box had none, USB keyboard & mouse only) so that it was possible to respond to prompts issued by the non-Dell-specific XP installer. Add LibreOffice (the original MS-Office disks are the install-three-times variety which have already been installed three times), Audacity, GIMP, SD-Player a non-Adobe PDF displayer, a few other tools & it’s all good... then XP fails to complete the SP2 update, gets h...

...on a few different machines, so it ain’t a coincidence. It doesn’t K-P as it launches KDM, only as you log in. Plus the Plymouth startup thingy is often quite reluctant to stop playing splash-screen. If you Ctrl-Alt-F* & log in to a text console, you can kill KDM, then “ /usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/startkde ” on some (not all) machines to get a running KDE session. Owe... kay. From a console: sudo su - cd /usr/bin mv kdm kdm.removed vi /etc/rc.local 12ji /bin/plymouth --quit sudo su - username /usr/bin/startx /usr/bin/startkde sleep 5 [Esc] :w! [Enter] ZZ It helps to delete the “ nosplash ” &amp “ ” keywords from the GRUB command you’re booting, add “ plymouth:debug ” then re-run grub-install , all of which gets Plymouth to settle down a bit more, plus slightly reduces the odds of being left with an always-K-P video card. Yes, that logs you in (no password) as exactly one user, but for many workstations, that’s...

Open case, discover: Two separate Pentium-II processors An AGP socket, sundry PCI sockets, two AT-sized ISA sockets a Matrox-brand PCI video card The video card would’ve been quite the bomb in its day! It turns out to be quite handy for putting into a dual-core 3GHz Pentium-IV machine with sundry PCI plus one PCI-X sockets plus built-in everything including video card. The machine will be used for running presentations, & rather than telling the projector to freeze the image, they can now edit a presentation on another screen, get it to the same point in the series, plus one, then minimise the old slide-show (LibreOffice Impress), flip new slideshow onto screen, maximise in under 2 seconds. The machine was to use PowerPoint under MS-Windows XP, as it had done in the past. It had picked up an irritating virus, which seemed to do nothing except propagate itself onto any USB stick plugged in, & knife any shell-type ( CMD.EXE ) actions in the guts — including update the viru...