Installing Mandriva 2008.1 on my MacBook Sunday, Apr 27 2008 

Mandriva johngevans 5:23 pm

Ok, so installing isn’t the problem, it’s that first reboot that’s the killer. Having looked thru the Ubuntu forums for advice on how to pull this off, I seem to have come away with the impression that the boot loader should not be installed onto the MBR, but rather the linux partition itself (dev/sda3 in my case). When I tried that and rebooted, all I got for my efforts was a quick flash of something about GRUB, and then another reboot to the rEfit screen. Rinse, recycle, repeat…

After repeating the installation a few times with the same result, I installed GRUB to the MBR (the way one would normally do it on PC hardware), and it worked. The rEFit boot menu came up with the mandriva option alongside of OS X, and I was giddy with anticipation.

My hopes were soon crushed as KDE wouldn’t start. Hmm, maybe that error message during installation about libkdebase4 being corrupt wasn’t kidding… Oh well, icewm started up ok and I was able to get libkdebase4 from the repositories, and then KDE was fine. Obviously I burned a bad CD.

Wireless worked right away.

Next thing to figure out is this infernal trackpad. It’s just way too sensitive; it interprets regular mouse motions as clicks when I definitely did not click.

 

Boston Marathon 2008 Sunday, Apr 27 2008 

Running , johngevans 5:01 pm

Hmmph. I guess that was… ok… I was shooting for a sub 3:20 so as to qualify again for next year, but instead I came in at 3:27:00 on the nose. Looks like I’ll have to find a nice flat fall marathon. Maybe Berlin…

This was my 10th Boston, and the crowd was great, the best I’ve ever seen. The weather was a little bit on the warm side, though. The cloud cover vanished just before the race got underway, and as a result I ended up with a serious sunburn by the time the day was over.