This is a case of some interesting role reversal. I went ot a friend’s house tonight after work to install a new cd burner. The burner installed quite easily (Dell’s new desktop tower case is extremely easy to work in), and soon we were off to install the old burner that hadn’t worked correctly at her work so that she could transfer data back and forth over CD’s. We took the old burner (HP8200 series external USB) over to her work and it preceeded to cause all kinds of problems. I got a little Win2k bootup BSOD, then uninstalled the drivers/software. This, of course, also somehow killed the drivers for the NIC, which is a really bad thing because she uses a client/server POS/inventory system. I did manage to get everything up and running again.
After everything was done, she asked if I wanted the malfunctioning burner. She used that nasty “if you don’t take it I’m just going to throw it out” line. Of course I took it with me. I’m like the Humane Society of random computer parts. I have more crap floating around here because I can’t bear to throw away a working (or semi-working) piece of equipment. I took it home, and for personal amusement I powered the burner up and plugged it into my Via Eden motherboard (running Red Hat 8.0), and rebooted. My thought was that perhaps, as an off chance, Anaconda would pick it up on the reboot and it might possibly work.
I was a little dissapointed when no new hardware was found during the reboot. After it booted, I did throw in Disk 1 of the Red Hat 8.0 distro just to amuse myself. Amazingly, the CD-ROM automounted, a window popped up with the contents of the CD, and I was asked if I wanted to run the Autorun script or not. How freaky is that? It just worked. Isn’t that how things are supposed to work under windows?
Linux on the desktop +1
Update: Oh yeah, it burns, too.