Mandrakeiva

A long time ago, I installed Mandrake Linux on my home PC. As a set-up it was OK, but I did make a major fuck-up of the bootloader, where linux was the default install, so you had to choose to go to Windows within the first ten seconds or bang, you were autoloading into Mandrake. Most of the time this didn’t actually bother me, which is why I left it the way it was. After all, the first rule of techies is “if it works (after a fashion) why bother fixing it?”.

However, since moving in with Herself, it’s become more of an issue. And of course I’d forgotten the log-in password I set up on Mandrake. In fact, I’ve still no idea what it was. But I went in using an Ubuntu LiveCD (i.e. it boots off the CD, rather than from anything you’ve got installed) which was cool, but I still couldn’t find the bits of code I needed to fuck about with in order to change the boot order.

Last Friday I finally bit the bullet, and downloaded the latest version of Mandrake. Now called Mandriva for reasons I can’t be arsed to go into, it’s still a download involving 3x CDs (so about 2.5Gb all told) which meant I was naughty and did it from work before burning the CDs to take home, rather than bothering with doing it from home. (The joys of a 2Gb pipe in to work)

Over the weekend I went the Windows®™ route, and simply reinstalled Mandriva over Mandrake, completely from scratch. I also remembered this time to configure the bootloader so that now Windows is the default OS, which’ll make Herself a lot happier.

As a happy side-effect, everything Linux-based installed fine and worked first time too, which is nice – and very helpful for the future. What’s less helpful is that I’m likely to be ordering the bits for the new PC this week anyway, which kind of makes all of the above a bit moot. Gah, timing.