At long last.

The great re-install finally seems to be happening.

The story is long and complicated, and it's been difficult to reach this point, requiring an arcane set of software tools, but most especially useful was the XP-pro DVD. Yep, that's right - Installing linux required the use of XP. This knowledge is the fruit of 3 evenings labour!

The story is that although each version of linux contains it's own set of disc partitioning tools, most of them are flawed. Thus when I partitioned the disc with PCLOS is didn't create clean free spaces, but instead marked them in some way for PCLOS use only. PCLOS had to go on first because Sabayon uses logical volume management: a great tool that seems to good good access to storage space, but which locks out PCLOS and Ubuntu (mostly). PCLOS also fails to install a bootloader properly, so that windows will always boot into windows regardless - not clever.

The answer was to do a full format in XP (a 'quickie' wasn't 'deep' enough) to create a single 1.39Gb partition. PCLOS was then installed by taking space from the NTFS partition, taking about 139Gb. Because it doesn't load GRUB properly it was then necessary to reboot it into the live CD again and resize the NTFS partition (I could probably do this using the XP DVD, but familiarity made me want to use the partition tools in Linux).

So having created 800Gb+ of apparently free space, I found that for both Sabayon 5.2 and 5.3 (running off live CDs, remember, so several minutes boot up time each try) the installers were crashing because the space, while not formatted, was also not 'free'. Load up XP again, and I could see that although the 800Gb partition was not formatted, it was also not truly free space either, so using XP tools this time I deleted all data in it.

And re-booted with Sabayon 5.3 again.

THIS TIME it saw the space as truly free, formatted it (seemed to take forever) and then installed. I've just updated the software update manager - called entropy - to the current version and refreshed the repository lists (Linux software is held in central stores, rather than pulled from anywhere on the web).

My final installation will now be Kubuntu, if it will go in. Why not Ubuntu? Because Gnome doesn't seem to posses the tools to establish a wireless network in a sensible fashion, and I also like the KDE 4.4 interface. That will hopefully allow me to create a KDE version of Ubuntu Studio that can also connect wirelessly and allow for updates etc. Plus Ubuntu uses GRUB 2, which has excellent automatic recognition of other OSs, and will allow access to PCLOS that was first installed.

Let's hope I don't just Nuke the system and have to start again!

So here we go - I hope i don't