So, late last night, I began installing Linux again. I'd done this once before, towards the end of last summer, but hit a snag because I was installing it on my second hard drive -- purchased for just this purpose -- but, for the want of a couple of cables, I couldn't use it and my Zip drive at the same time, and my Zip drive was the more important of the two.

I decided to start from scratch again this time, rather than working with what I'd managed to install the last time around. So I hooked up the drive, repartitioned it, installed Linux, and everything was fine.

Yeah, right.

Okay, more accurately, I hooked up the drive, the system stopped recognizing any of the hard drives, and I fiddled around a bit, eventually discovering that I hadn't shoved the other IDE cable in firmly enough while reconnecting everything. I rebooted, changed the settings in the BIOS again, repartitioned the second drive, installed Linux, rebooted, and discovered that the second drive had to be on the first cable, as a slave to the first hard drive, rather than the master on the second cable. So I switched the cables around, rebooted, and Linux got cranky, 'cause it expected the system to be on /dev/hdc1, and it was now on /dev/hdb1, and, worse, it expected the Zip drive to be at /dev/hdb4, which didn't even exist anymore. So I found the relevant files and changed the references, rebooted, and everything was hunky-dory. Or at least functioning. More or less.

(Don't worry if you had trouble following any of that. It's not really important. The non-technical version is: "I came, I swore, I conquered.")

I didn't have any manuals, though, and I'd forgotten much of what I'd figured out the last time I tried installing the thing, so I sallied forth to the library today, ultimately hitting two branches in my quest for literature on Linux. I ended up with a copy of Slackware Linux Unleashed!, which was designed for a different flavor of Linux entirely, but was close enough for many intents and purposes.