Utterly beautiful. Booted right up, recognized nearly all my hardware (it didn't know what to make of my wireless card, but fortunately I've also got a wired Ethernet card), has pretty recent versions of various nifty software packages (The GIMP, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Audacity) and it looks great as well. So I figured, what the hell? I'll install it permanently. I can set it up as a dual-boot system so I can get back to Windows when I need it as a game server.

As if it could ever be that simple. No, the two (old) hard drives I had in the machine only totaled about 12 GB; the first one was nearly full, and the second one had a lot of the games it serves; I didn't want to delete them, and if I repartitioned the hard drive, I wouldn't have a lot of space left for data. A trip to Best Buy yielded an 80GB drive for $30 (once the rebate checks arrive). I gave Karen the hard drive and instructed her not to return it to me until I'd filled out the rebate forms.

While I found instructions for installing Knoppix onto the hard drive, I figured I'd go all the way and just put Debian onto it (as Knoppix is a subset of Debian). The first time I installed it, I ran into trouble when I decided to manually select the packages I wanted to include. See, it displayed packages in a hierarchical list. To expand or contract the branches of the list, one is supposed to hit the <Enter> key. Thanks to Windows, I'm used to hitting the keypad plus key to expand a branch, or the keypad minus key to contract it. These keys, unfortunately, turned out to mean "add this package" or "remove this package" — or, when the cursor is over a branch rather than an individual package, "Add all packages in this branch" or "remove all packages in this branch". So I ended up accidentally removing some very important parts of the operating system. Oops. Start again...