Wonky home PC -- still plugging away

Picked up an inexpensive USB keyboard. (To the Aussies: Cheapest I found was at Dick Smith's. Cheaper than Tandy/Radio Shack by about five bucks. Actually, three or four[?] bucks more than by mail-order, but without the nuisance.)

With my very own USB keyboard, I then tried out Puppy Linux 1.0.8 and Elive 0.4.2 on The Lady's PC (the ''bad keyboard'' machine -- the one with the bad PS/2 ports, that won't take input from the USB keyboard). Hoped that the ''Live CD'' would be better at detecting the USB keyboard. But, no dice: So much for using a ''Live CD'' as a ''rescue disk'' -- at least in cases of bad keyboard ports.

Puppy Linux wouldn't detect my serial mouse. And, since I've already worked out that there's a physical problem with the PS/2 port, it means I'm mouse-less.

Elive hung, because it won't start without the user making a selection with the keyboard. And, since the keyboard won't pass any input...


In terms of my mega-tower: Tried installing Zenwalk 1.2, but it pooped out early on. Is the the mega-tower's non-standard setup, or is the CD-burning hardware or software on the ''no keyboard'' machine somehow at fault? I began to worry that my ''USB keyboard workaround'' on the ''bad keyboard'' machine actually wasn't working. Or, more specifically, that there was some deeper problem, of which the broken PS/2 ports was only the outward manifestation.


HOWEVER!!! Just as I was beginning to doubt the CD-burner, Ark Linux managed to install. Pretty nifty: Even lets you play a Tetris clone while the files are being installed.

Not sure if it's standard or not, but although there were three install options -- wipe everything, install in available space, and install alongside existing Windows/Linux system -- only the first option (''wipe everything'') was available; the other two were greyed out.

Unfortunately, this one terminated at GRUB (the bootloader). I didn't set it to boot from the CD-ROM, but that's what it tried to do. I'm thinking there's something left over from one of my earlier attempts at installing Linux. I'll have to look more at this later.


Anyhow, things are progressing along. At some point, I'll use the ''new, used'' PC that I bought from work to take over the ''Windows'' duties in the household (scanning, extracting digital photos) from the ''bad keyboard'' computer. At that point, I'll experiment with finding a Linux distro that will accept the USB keyboard properly.


--GG