Just to finish off my thread, I'm nearly done with my Mepis install. The install went well, but I literally have no time to put my data back on and set it up as I want.
I had to install from the CD three times (bacause I am an idiot). Thank you to everyone who made suggestions for partitioning. I cross-referenced your recommendations with an on-line Guide for Mepis on the Aspire, and I ended up making one Extended partition with three Logical partitions in it (root, home and swap). I did not use Volker's suggestion for backing up the old MBR before I installed GRUB, but now I know why I should have (I am a firm believer in understanding one's mistakes as well as not making them twice). Anyway, the first install went well, so I set about tweaking it. GRUB properly detected the 'real' XP OS and the Acer eRecovery partition and put them in the menu (and they worked). When booting Linux the vga mode is not set correctly by the installer so 'splashy' complains. Later I discovered that vga=9 works quite nicely. Anyway, I uninstalled splashy, and that was a big mistake as a bunch of startup scripts started failing and I couldn't re-install splashy. The second install did not go so well. Being smart I decided not to reformat /home because it was there already. Being super-smart I decided that I didn't need to install GRUB either, since it was already there and I hadn't changed any of the partitions... The third install went well as I decided to do everything over again. GRUB was back as it was, and I had a fresh home directory to play with. The sound worked on first boot, but failed thereafter. I had to run alsaconf to detect and reinstall the sound modules. I've tweaked a couple of things, but I have found that most of the caveats mentioned on the web concerning Mepis on the Aspire no longer apply. Obviously got fixed in the RC process leading up to the final release. I cannot test everything as I need more packages, and I can't get more packages until I get an internet connection somewhere (don't have it in the apartment yet). However, it starts up, runs and shuts down cleanly, so I am happy. The next step is to copy the old /home backup from my old laptop. I will copy everything across verbatim, and I expect everything to break because all the hidden stuff such as KDE config files will no longer be appropriate for the new version, but maybe it will sort of work. Once I am happy that I have everything working I will overwrite the backup disk with a new mirror of /home In other news, the XP system I use at work is riddled with viruses, and so are the internet cafes here (no, really). I have installed an antivirus at work and I think I've wiped everything, but it is fortunate that I already had antivirus at home as it trapped the virus on my USB stick before it could be transferred to the XP machine. How do I love thee Microsoft? Let me count the ways. A
