I recently posted about being sold a computer on which Linux would not install. I left off with the computer still at the shop, and the guy trying to install it himself. Well, Lime’s looked around online and found that, since I’d taken longer than a week (it took me 8 days to give up on installing anything on the system) to go back and complain, I legally was less able to get a refund — apparently the law really does work that way here, or so she suggested to me.

So anyway, when we went there this time, the guy was quite reasonable — not so much of a 멍청이, and the long and the short of it was that he pulled out the newer model of the same PC I’d bought — this one with a dual-core AMD64 processor — and Ubuntu Linux 6.06 installed on the first try. (6.06 is the last proper disc I have that wasn’t burned by me. I figured having such an official-looking disk was a good idea since he’d implied that there had been something wrong with my home-burned install discs for later versions of Ubuntu.

Anyway, once I got the PC home, I gave it a try with Linux Mint, and that, too, installed nicely. The nice thing about Linux mint was that certain things — like wireless networking — worked straight out of the box. Maybe they will with a newer version of Ubuntu, too, I don’t know… but they sure don’t in 6.06.

The downside was that the newer model, being actually new-new, set me back another $100. I doubt I would have actually spent $700 a week ago when hunting essentially for a PC to take along while traveling without worrying constantly about loss or theft, but at the moment, $100 extra seems like a small resolution to turn a doorstop into a fast little working laptop with a year’s warranty.

Another moment of interest was when I was installing Linux on the laptop, and Lime was off searching for a bowl of ramen. I started reading a book (Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End) on my new Bookeen Cybook — review coming soon — and all the guys working in the shop were drooooooling. I think it’s the first time I’ve been an early adopter.

Anyway, the PC issue got solved.