I'm still here ! I didn't blow my PC's brains all over the desk. Following a clattering of shiny disc things, lots of complicated partitioning choices, which wasn't made any easier by the fact that two of my hard disks are identical in brand, model number and size, and that one of them has everything important to me on it and the linux partitioning app couldn't give a shit about that and made me sweat it for a few seconds when I wasn't sure if I'd nuked the wrong one.

But anyway it worked, the penguin is here as is Redmond OS. Minor pisser being the fact that my lucent winmodem isn't recognised in linux, unless I can fathom some driver nonsense. Which means I need to check broadband availability in my area this week.

Phew.