Church bells ring out the toll of our night.

[reddragdiva]

• Little Johnny's been going to town. redcountess has stopped talking about wanting to go back to Australia since reading things like this, this and this. UK readers: for fucksake, vote carefully in May.

We have solved the locked room puzzle. 1. Ignore the instructions on the wiki. 2. Put in the Debian Sarge floppies and point the installer at the Ubuntu CD, which it recognises as sufficiently Debianlike. This will install Ubuntu and its shitload of packages and then restart in the Ubuntu installer. Both installers will need you to tell them where their arses are in a couple of places, but apart from that they just work. 3. Install ndiswrapper, which is on the CD but not installed by default. 4. Install and configure the drivers for the Netgear card as directed on the ndiswrapper site. Profit!!!

We are now working on getting it to work after a reboot. Everything says the card is working except the card itself, whose lights flash that it isn't, and the notable lack of flowing data. Ubuntu 5.4 runs kernel 2.6.10; all versions 2.6.8 or later are known to have severe APM problems on the Thinkpad 560X. I suppose we could disable APM and hotplug. My fucking God I hate Linux. Did I mention that?

We have stolen the freshly-married cavalorn and lucybond, who are coming over here as Liz can't go there. So there. Assuming they didn't get too liquored up by the Marquis de Carabas and can find their way out again.