Normally, technology and I are pretty damn good friends. We may have a tiff every now and again, but, on the whole, I prefer zeros and ones to humanity.

However.

Sometimes technology is a pain in the arse to the degree I begin to wonder if, perhaps, I’ve been unreasonable about the whole ‘going outside’ and ‘conversing with people’ thing; perhaps that would be preferable to shouting at an inanimate object. At least people change their behaviour in some way when cursed at like a drunken Irish truck driving sailor. At least humans don’t look at you impassively when you grab their face and scream, ‘WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU GLORIFIED ABACUS?!’

But I get ahead of myself. Let me take you back to the middle of last week.

So, at the start of January, I introduced my husband to Linux. (His not-very-old-Windows-7-running-6gb-of-RAM-having laptop crashed when he tried to run Python scripts. What. Ever.) I love me some Linux so put Mint 14 on his p.o.s. Dell Inspiron e1705 with 2gb of RAM machine. It was happy as Larry to run Python scripts and my husband, K, fell madly in love straightaway.

K dug the control and customalisability and immediately went about trying other distros to find just the right one.

Like any normal person, I like new and shiny software, and soon I wanted to try the distros he liked. This was the beginning of several days of technological problems. Here is an allegorical painting of those days:

Up until this point, Linux had been this to me:

Then I decided to try a few other distros and this happened…

Um… I’m sorry?

For those playing along at home, this is what we tried:

Started with Linux Mint 13
Linux Mint 14 with KDE: Very shiny KDE 4, but damn, was it slow.
[I lose track of the order after that but the list includes:]

Linux Lite: It turned on my numlock and wouldn’t let me turn it off, so if I used the u, i, o, j, k, l or m keys I’d get 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 0. I couldn’t use a terminal (it didn’t recognise my password because of the numbers where there should have been letters) to do the things I needed to do to fix it.

Crunchbang, whose logo is to the right. It’s perfect, because it looks like swearing, which is what I was doing when trying to install it. Wicd network manager can kiss the whitest part of my Anglo-Irish arse. This was a huge bummer, as it looked like that perfect system for me. (I tried the ethernet port and it worked for five minutes and then…stopped.)

Archbang: Very similar looking to Crunchbang, but when I went to install it, it wanted me to partition the drive using cfdisk, which I’d never done before and cocked it right up. Then I read the manual and saw gparted was included but by then… I don’t know what I’d done. (And what geek worth their cred reads the manual *before* doing something?) I tried partitioning the drive using gparted on a live USB from Linux Mint, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t even get Archbang to run from a live USB, let alone install.

Mandriva: Dude, if I wanted something that was going to be that slow, bloated and that much of a system hog I’d use Windows.

Linux Voyager (a flavour of Xubuntu): Seemed cool until it stopped recognising my wireless card the third time I booted up.

Ubuntu: Ugh. I switched to Mint for a reason. Thanks for reminding me.

Aaaaand back to Linux Mint 14, but using Mate. Fucking hell.

[There were two or three others I couldn’t even get to boot, but I can’t recall which ones anymore.]

The upside is that I now know our twenty-six digit alphanumeric wifi password off the top of my head. I’m considering using it for every password I need.

Wasting scads of hours on technology with nothing to show for it is annoying enough, but I’d had plans for posts for every day of last week in celebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. those will be posted this week. To get things back into the gloomy swing, the Poe Toaster’s replacement showed up on our man’s birthday… or I should say replacements, because it would seem many have taken up the mantle. Note: They’re supposed to leave bourbon, as well, but it looks like some people are cheap.