Well, I had played around with the little guy a bit, and enabled the Start menu, and that worked fine. So I thought I’d get ambitious and go for the full desktop, as described at http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/06/eee-pc-tips-a-crash-course-in-linux/.

Opened up the terminal and used apt-get to download the kicker program and installation seemed to go well; after installing I had the "Full Desktop" option on the shutdown menu. Trouble is, when I pressed it, I just went back into the same old "easy mode" menu. So then I did something really stupid; I set preferences to boot into Full Desktop mode by default.

I shut down the computer and rebooted, and found myself in an endless loop – the full desktop will flash on the screen for a moment, then the system will reboot itself, over and over and over.

No problem, right? After all, it comes with the system restore built in. Just press F9 during startup and you can go back to "factory default settings." Went through that process and again, it seemed to work but … after rebooting, I’m still in the loop. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m in an episode of Star Trek Next Gen … remember that one?

So I’ve screwed up my little Linux PC rather badly. I should have known better than to think Linux would work for me, after all the bad things I’ve said about it. I guess I’ll be trying to install XP on it sooner than I’d planned.

Meanwhile, be very careful about trying to install the full desktop. Obviously it works for some people, but I can attest to the fact that it doesn’t always work.

deb@shinder.net