Hi! I’m a bit late…(courtesy:lightning quick network speeds @coll…{I started this post a couple of weeks back, at home… and its been rotting all this while, in my drafts!} ) [Its already time when the resolutions taken just a couple of weeks back fade away into oblivion… ] but anyways.. Wish You a Very Happy gNew Year!! oops.. Happy New Year!

Actually this year started of for me not as the usual Happy New Year.. but as Happy gNew Year! I have been gifted a new PC by my mom n dad for the new year… and that too an AMD system, (Believe it or Not..) preloaded with Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4]! {Its like a fairy tale for me…} Its an AMD Athlon 3200+ with (512+256)MB RAM and 80GBHDD…. and an awesome 17" TFT Monitor!!

I am happy that my resolutions to have a go at the comp… [ and use it to the best of my abilities to learn about s/w and h/w…. to try n imbibe in myself the spirit of true hacking…] haven’t yet gone down the drain! { I’ve already ripped open the HCL company seal on my box… and opened it up a couple of times to fiddle with my HDD and RAM… }

A couple of days after I got the comp… I tried installing Debian… and being a NooB doesn’t help..(does it?).. I messed up the X-Server… After some desperate attempts to get the thing working.. I gave up……. [I had some ebooks etc. downloaded on my comp at home, which I wished to dump on my comp]. So I persisted… I tried FC 6 [Fedora Core] …. everything was fine until the final step… FC refused to show me the Login screen!! Finally at 3 am I gave up…. I planned to get the most valuable stuff onto a CD and set things right, back in the comforts of my room and the company of Voodoo, but that was not to be….

At 10am, (I just woke up then), I find that the comp at home refuses to turn ON!! I thought it was some petty problem like a loose contact somewhere, which could be set right easily.. but after an hour of struggle.. I realise that the problem is serious.. {The SMPS had blown off} [looks like a Hindi Movie,doesn’t it??]

Then began the real fun!! I somehow managed to connect the old hard disk to the new Mother Board…[my new cabinet is quite small… I now realize that I placed the HDD in quite a precarious position…].. but there was no OS on either HDD… [the “Windows” on the old one…. din’t open… they felt awkward in their new environs… ;-) ] I would have returned back to coll without any of my stuff.. but for Knoppix (live) … it saved the day for me!! Finally I managed to dump my stuff onto the new HDD… [All ’s well that ends well!! :-)] Now I’ve got both the Linux distro’s [Debian and FC-6] along with all the stuff I collected at home! [ Thanks to V00d00!! ] along with a little confidence that I am not too bad at handling H/W!

When I look back at this whole episode… It feels as if nature had conspired…. to keep this one resolution of mine ALIVE…. to ignite in me the fire of “the spirit of true hacking”… [ I hope that I play my part well.. (nature played its brilliantly…) and pick up a zillionth part of the commitment ( and dedication to hacking) of the Hackers from the Hacker Land!! ]

Here’s a pic of one of the very few cool things I could get my comp to do….. [ I accessed the Remote Desktop Server on my own system…..]

The Hacker Ethic : Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! – Steven Levy’s “Hackers : The Heroes of The Computer Revolution”