My attempts at moving to full-time Linux are well-documented here @ SoD. ;)

I made another attempt this weekend and I'm closer than I've ever been. Vista made this attempt a real nightmare, heh. Ah well.

When I built this box, I built it with 2 identical hard drives; a pair of 1TB Western Digitals. The plan was to have one drive for Vista and another for Linux: a very easy way to setup dual boot. All you have to do is goto into the BIOS and swap which drive is primary, and that will choose which OS to boot. That way Vista doesn't get odd about your boot sector/etc. Anyway... Heh.

When I installed Vista, apparently something very odd happened, that I never noticed, and really messed me up. Apparently, it put all its boot information - the boot loader and all that - on Drive 1, but all the data (programs, OS files, all that) was on Drive 2. I never noticed this, as I just installed Vista, it worked great and I went on with life.

When I went to install Linux, I just installed it to the blank (ish) drive which was reserved for it all along, and told it to put its boot loader (GRUB!) there. But... that's where Vista's boot info was. Even though Vista itself and all the programs/data were where they were supposed to be. So, of course... Vista wouldn't boot.

Startup Repair... nope. There's really no way to tell Vista "hey, dude, trust me... there's a valid Vista install and a bunch of programs sitting on this drive, just slap your boot info there and STFU and boot, suckah!". So... reinstalled Vista over the Linux installation to preserve the programs and data from the old Vista install - then copied said stuff over to the new Vista install. Verify boot info and actual "stuff" are on the same, proper drive, then proceed to install Linux again to the other drive. Sigh.

Linux install of course went textbook. Installed the proprietary nVidaia drivers and X wouldn't start. Some quick Google searching revealed the problem: nVidia's Linux drivers don't really like SLI all that much (and I have 2x GTX 295 cards), so you have to manually edit the X configuration file and provide the BusID of the device you want to be primary. Do so, whammo, working (and FAST!) X.

So before I went too far with pimping out my desktop and such, I wanted to make sure this was a viable project. I need to be able to play my games under Linux, and right now my primary game is EQ2. So add the WINE repository, download and install WINE, copy over my EQ2 installation and fire it up. Launchpad/patcher crash. Google for info. Need to get rid of wine-gecko. Bingo, working patcher. Working client. Working sound! Excellent performance, too! And that in KUNARK! Ok - viable!

I went on and pimped out my desktop. Got conky all setup. AWN setup. Killer themes and such installed and tweaked a bit! I'm in Linux heaven. Then it came time for my wife and I to play together and I had issues getting the client to run as it had before. Dunno what the issue was - I'd been doing a lot since then so who knows; might've just needed a reboot. But it was time for us to play so I just rebooted into Vista and we played. I'll figure it out today.

But, the thing is: I HAD EQ2 working perfectly, and so it should work again, it just might for some reason need a fresh boot or ... who knows. It was working though, so it will again. And I might be willing to deal with needing a fresh reboot, to be running full-time Linux finally!