Greetings from wet Western Washington -

Yet another testimonial regarding antiX 11 - I am the one guy in a group of friends that actually likes playing with computers, breaking them and upgrading them, but this Dell Dimension 4550 fought me every step of the way.

XP was taking 10 minutes to load completely ( not a stretch as the machine has only 256 MB RAM ), so I extolled the owner on the virtues of antiX for such a system. After a tenative ' really? ' and an assurance from me that her precious Windows installation was safe, she agreed to let me play.

First getting a working CD drive in it - check

Another week and was able to install a second hard drive ( remember the promise of safety ... )

Trying to boot it from 3 different burnt CDs ( antiX11, antix 8.5, Mepis 8.5_32 ) over a period of a few weeks - no joy

Booting it off of a usb stick - antiX 11 via antixusb burn - no joy,

Booting it off of a usb stick - antiX 11 via unetbootin burn - success after I probably abandoned the first boot attempt too early ( patience grasshopper ).

So, last night at 10pm I finally was able to install antix 11 to the second drive- rebooted it and got the dreaded grub error 21. I went in and played with the drive numbers in menu.lst - no joy ... and ... as it was getting late and I had no answers, had to explain that I would be back today after work and try again - until then, I left the usb stick with antiX 11 running for web access - she was not happy ( remember the promise of safety ).

This afternoon after a scroogle search I ended up at a mepiscommunity forum post by Lucky9 ( I knew then that everything would be alright ) about bios not recognizing second hard drives.

After work today I walked into her house with confidence, checked the bios, reset the second hard drive to auto and rebooted.

__{{emoticon}}__ Its great to have my status as a computer god __{{emoticon}}__ back

Thanks for a great distribution and for being members of a great community - the story that is infrequently commented on is the confidence that such an operating system and such support give to us who like to tinker - and the effect of those around that person as they begin to understand the difference between oss.

Nice post __{{emoticon}}__ .

I once had a winXP install on my laptop that took 10 mins to load... That's what really got me started using GNU/Linux systems (it was a used laptop that came without recovery disks). There is only one instance of windows left on my 3 running computers that I keep for light gaming and just in case something has to be done online using windows... I really hate that! In all I have about 7 different distros running across the 3 pcs. And I am about to try to resurrect another old desktop and two really old laptops that a friend got and has no use for, all using AntiX! It's really great stuff and I would (and do!) recommend it to anyone who wants something fairly user-friendly but encourages getting"under the hood" and messing with things. We're glad you like it!