After reboot and a glass of wine with some mozzarella and dry baguette, I try again – click on the tour in the three choices screen. Same black, dead screen with an apple. Now what? I am ready to give it a whack this time, but wait, if I punish the Apple, I will have to go back to SuSE that had been killed by Novel. This is not good.

Another reboot, wine, mozzarella and some green olives and we have a plan. Try the software update. Yep, there are updates for all three components of iWork ‘08. Install the update, more wine and water. This time we are going to press on “try” instead of taking a hike with a black screen. After obligatory legal button presses it all goes slooooooow. I can not even select anything from the dock. My Mac has been reduced to the standard WIntel. I can not take it anymore! I will donate my Mac mini to the garbage man. That is it!

I got my cousin’s laptop working thanks to the power of KNOPPIX.

Win XP SP2 installed OK on Dell Inspiron 600m after reformatting the second partition. First is occupied by Dell Diagnostics. Everything is fine, but where is the Internet. There was an ugly yellow question mark next to the Ethernet device. Tried to reinstall one from XP disk. Nothing happened. Now what? Obviously, I did not have the original Dell CD shipped with the laptop. This would be to easy. I am also too old to play the Microsoft driver charade. They want me to connect to the Internet to get the driver that will fix the broken Internet. It looks like a paradox. Not if you have the KNOPPIX CD and know some Linux.

Here is the solution.

Boot with the KNOPPIX CD. Open terminal window. Execute “lspci” to get the list of all adaptor model numbers and manufacturers (in my case Ethernet adaptor was Broadcom Tigon3). Open the browser (the Internet works in Linux without any hunting for stinking drivers). Go to Dell.com, search for Inspiron 600m driver downloads. Download the correct driver. Reboot to WinXP. Install the downloaded driver. Done. Not yet.

Next we have to go trough the mandatory agony of the Windows Update. Even when set to automatic update, after all automatic updates have been installed, there are more updates to be installed.

After two days of of work, I am glad that I do not have to do that often. I do not feel sorry for the people that put up with this nonsense, they deserve it. If you want my advice, there is an easier way – buy Mac. But, you say – all of my friends are using MS Windows. I say – get new, smarter friends.

KNOPPIX is a bootable, live Linux system made by Klaus Knopper.

You can read more about it at http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html .

Download it, burn it and it works like magic. Put it in any computer with a CD drive and you are good to go. It does not mater what or if an operating system is installed on that computer. The KNOPPIX CD is live, self contained and it will run even if the hard drive is damaged, hence I use it to fix broken computers.

Custom domain name setup on blogspot.com account could not be easier. It just consists of typing an existing domain name owned by you and two clicks.

The real problem, for some people, is the next critical step, the DNS setup required to make the whole project work correctly. You need to make a CNAME record assigning www.yourdomain.tld to ghs.google.com in your DNS server configuration. This is done using the control panel at the place you registered your domain. Some registrars have easy and simple DNS control panels, others are terrible, almost unusable.

This is where the things get technical and can go ugly. The key word here is a CNAME, which stands for Canonical Name record. It is one of the DNS record types. It is frequently used to “substitute” one host name for another one, usually outside of the domain that we control. This record is unusual because both parts of it are host names instead of usual host name – IP address pair common in other DNS records. It is best to avoid using it, except in this case.

At the time of this post a query for DNS records reveals the following information:

ghs.google.com is an alias for ghs.l.google.com
ghs.l.google.com has address 66.249.81.121

However, reverse DNS query shows that the above IP is really assigned to another host
121.81.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer bx-in-f121.google.com
bx-in-f121.google.com has address 66.249.81.121

This is precisely why you should not try to use record other than CNAME or assign an IP address instead of name because Google controls DNS record for its host ghs.google.com and can change it as they wish. You should follow the instructions to use CNAME, if you can not – change your DNS provider or better move your domain to a different registrar.

At the end of our conversation my sister told me to use green color in my thumbnails and pictures. She also asked what is Linux. She knows art, painting, photography, Yoga and many other things.
I know some Linux.