Random Thoughts

In the space of 15 days, three computers in my daughter’s house have crashed or suffered some type of serious meltdown. My son-in-law’s machine went down as he was trying to finish his last assignments for the semester. Knoppix saved the day — and his papers. Then the day before I was to return to Louisiana I discovered that my laptop was dead. Well, at least there was nothing other than a light glowing telling me it was plugged in and charged. Knoppix wouldn’t do anything for it. It is on its way back to Acer as I write this.

An hour ago I got a call from my daughter telling me that her desktop had crashed. Fortunately, a Knoppix disk proves that the machine has at least some life in it. Hopefully she will be able to get the data off of it, and then she can decide what she wants to do.

But what are the odds of that happening? They seem astronomical, but maybe I am wrong.

My son-in-law got his final papers finished and should receive his MA on Friday. He had gotten used to running his computer off the Knoppix Live CD. I gave him a PCLinux disk to look at, and he has been playing around with it. He really likes it. I think that he is going to end up having to put a new hard drive in his machine, but I think it will have PCLinux on it when he does. At least I hope so!

At 7:15 am today I was frantically downloading Knoppix to create a live CD. After I got it, I stuck the disk in my son-in-law’s dead computer. It booted right up in Knoppix. After mounting the hard drive, I was able to access his files. We put the ones he needs right now on a thumb drive and transferred them to another computer. Over the weekend I hope to get all his files off the machine. He was good to go when I went to work at 8:45.

If you don’t have Knoppix Live CD, get one! It can save you. And it gives you a chance to try Linux, too. You just might find that you like it.