I turned on Rose's laptop last night intending to copy the presentation over and upload it. While I was there, though, I googled for the laptop's model and Linux. Apparently the captive drivers work nicely for the wireless card, and everything else is either working or work-aroundable...

So I downloaded the new Gentoo 2006.0 LiveCD and tried out the new installer. It's pretty sweet, though it's still a bit low-level for the newbie user. It also managed to re-check "install to MBR" when I paged back to change a setting (yikes!). The install log also ominously says "found the MBR in /dev/hda" right before "installed grub". Hopefully it hasn't hosed the XP install!

I didn't go for the GRP install (which I normally do) because the installer recommended against it. Regretting that now (I generally like to get the system running, then rebuild whatever packages need updating). It's up to KDE's PIM already, but it'll probably be a day or two until it finishes compiling all the little bits and pieces. Sigh, GRP should be the default for an installer IMO, after all, you use the installer when you just want to get the machine up and running fast. Ah, there it goes onto the all-important KDE games.

Oh, for some reason the livecd doesn't include a stage-3 image, so download that too if you're planning to do an install. (I actually downloaded it via BitTorrent from within the LiveCD, but it delayed the install process by 10 minutes or so (it's why I had to page back)).

Noticed something last night, the laptop has a Celeron... I'd somehow been mis-reading the sticker as saying "Centrino". The rather slow-ish speeds make a little more sense now.

Never did get the presentation uploaded. Oops.