The iMac is a good idea. I didn't like it at first, but grew to like it in all its polychromatic glory as it matured and became clear that Apple knew what it was doing in marketing and design. We finally elected to get some here at the Academy, in an office, in a lab, and one of them ended up near me, mostly existing as spare parts but it's still a computer so what the heck?

I've now attempted to use that computer for such resource intensive functions as "web browsing" or "real audio" or even, gasp, FTP.

The iMac sucks. The business office concurs. I won't go into depth. You may love your iMac. I don't love this one.

So, I'm doing the only possible rational thing. I'm gutting its brains and installing Yellow Dog Linux on it.

I decided to do this several days ago. Yellow Dog had a good presentation, it specifically claimed to work on iMacs, and I'd been frustrated with MkLinux and LinuxPPC before, so I figured "what the heck" and decided to download their distribution. I went to their ftp server and started the download.

Which died.

No big deal. I tried again.

I couldn't connect. This seemed weird, but maybe their server went down. So I checked their mirror sites and started trying to connect to one of them.

Any one of them.

Either the server refused connections, or the server didn't have the Yellowdog files (instead often having an empty directory), or did but it would die after 1 to 100 megabytes of download, and regardless of my FTP client it wouldn't pick up again. (The clients don't like picking up where they left off in a list of downloading files).

Finally, I bespoke Matt, who is one of my friends who knows Linux. Russ and Mek, my other Big Time Linux God Friends Frinku Frinku, weren't available right at that moment. So, I asked Matt for advice.

He told me that he had never -- never -- successfully downloaded a Linux distribution.

Poik.

"What do you do," I asked.

"I get the CD," he answered.

You know, my conspiracy theory sections of my brain are firing at this point. Doesn't it seem... convenient that this Morally High Ground Free Software seems to require you to buy a distribution (at, admittedly, rock bottom prices) in order to use it? Hmmmmmmmmmm?

Well, I gave in and ordered the CD set. It came in today, in a beautiful yellow and black binder that has that computer ditto bag type mesh pockets on the front and back. So, it presents well. And even as I type this, my iMac's hated underpowered video is learning the joys of No Video At All, with a blue installer screen with text on it, looking for all the world like an IBM XT in a really kickin' Tangerine Case.

I was going to tell you about Van, the unluckiest traveler alive, but my install just died and I've been e-mailing tech support as I was directed to, and so I'm just too tired.