My sad, star-crossed Dell Latitude laptop finally took the express train to Broketown this weekend, coughing up blue screens of unintelligible Microsoft gibberish and promising to drag Allie’s iTunes library across the river Styx with it. I hate this stupid machine and always have and I hope it knew that on the way out. What seemed like a light, versatile laptop turned out to be a Dell-designed nightmare. Its one USB port was almost wholly blocked by the strangely ovoid cable plug for the CD reader that it was crippled without. The touchpad would get into strange tarantellas of fidgeting which would send the mouse pointer screaming off to the side of the screen only to return after a conciliatory reboot.

And honestly, I didn’t care except for the prospect of my daughter losing her iTunes library and document folder of all of her High School essays. I had my laptop anagnorisis with this thing early on, realizing I should have ponied up the money for the MacBook. I was resigned to my lot in life, and took my punishment like one of the hopeful pilgrims in Dante’s Purgatorio.

But I had to get those files before the last spark of life left the thing, and with a strange inspiration found my salvation in a Knoppix CD. Knoppix is a complete Debian Linux environment on a bootable CD. I read about it on SlashDot sometime last year and got the excellent O’Reilly book “Knoppix Hacks” that includes a copy of the distribution. I stuck that in the CD Reader, punched F12 at the startup screen, booted from the CD … and it Just Worked. Awesome. In about five minutes I was in a rich KDE graphical environment, very-Windows like, and a quick check in the folder browser showed that the failing hard drive had been found and initialized.

I’ve learned just enough Linux to get around, so I started Samba from the Start Menu, then leaned over to my Windows desktop machine to browse the Network, and there it was. I copied Allie’s document folder over to the Windows box, and then searched for and copied all of the purchased music.

Since the odds of my getting a MacBook anytime soon are slim to none, and Slim just left, I did finally search for and order a replacement hard drive for the demon laptop. But when I set that up, I think I’ll add a Debian partition, giving credit where credit is due.