Playing on the test rig again. This time it's loaded with Xandros 2 Bussness edition. from around 2004 or so. It had not been used on this set up before and was expecting tihngs to well. As you know it's P166MMX based mobo with a 8meg SIS pci video card and a 10/100 RealTech pci nic. Initially I was having a bit of bother. There were two issues. One was the onboard anti virus and the second one was the two port usb port I'd fitted. As this mobo was pulled out of a 1997 vintage system it only sported three pci slots and two ISA slots. Not unusual at the time. I fitted an ESS1866 16-bit ISA card in one of the ISA slots, as you do.

To cut long story short, Once the booting was sorted out Xandros automaticly configured it self and booted straight to the gordy Xandros logon prompt. Remember this Xandros , from 2004, install was on another system using a ps/2 mouse,(this rig has a serial mouse) different monitor, mobo and different video card. I logged in loaded up the desktop and played about with some of the apps and up graded some software. The only bit of hardware that wasn't detected was the pnp ISA sound card so tried to see if I could get it going as I'd great success in the past going ISA sound cards running in older setups, namely Turbo Linux 6.0 and SuSE 7.2 on the same setup less usb card.

After finding out the sound card didn't work I did some intweb searching. Not much realy came up wrt this distro but a few threads on folk with similar issues so without thinking opened a terminal sued to root and typed "apt-get kcontrol and pressed enter. After I pressed enter apt kindy obeyed and started it's fetch which included any files it needed to carry out it's task. Apt got the files and displey the total amount to down load and ask me if I wanted to proceed. I pressd y and download they did. Was fetched and secure on my system apt started to install the files inthe process it also started to delete file. All these files started with the word xandros My jaw dropped and yelled out a load F*CK!!

Too late to do any a back peddling I let apt keep doing what it was told to do. Aboot 10 minutes later apt finished silently and without a fuss. I went to the menu opened it and ALL its contents had gone. Again F*CK! and double F*CK! Brassed off I logged out then shut the rig down and went and had a yogurt.

After about 15 minutes later I turned the rig back on. While starting I remembered to hold dow the Del key, get in to the bios and disable the anti virus, boy thats a pain. Memory count runs trough ok, HDD and CDROM drive detcected, lilo prompt pops up for a second then the Xandros load screen appears. Kernal initialized, kernal loading and hardware detected. Things are going well and GDM pops in to view with a cursor in the logon box. Now I had three choices here-logon to the default desktop, which I'd just borked, ICEWM or Window Maker. Thinking what's the worst that can happen if I log in to the default setup? So selected default logged in and crossed my fingers.. About two or so minutes(it felt longer) was presented with a KDE desktop. Some thing wasn't right though something was different.

First thing I did was have a look at the menu. WOW! It was back. Not only that it appeared snappier than the original Xandros arrangement. after playing about a bit launching Xchat , Mozilla and a terminal everything was quite a bit sappier all round. What had happened was when I ran apt to get kcontrol all the Xandros customized KDE files were updated /replaced with new Debian Sarge files and all the fancy animations and widgets have been turned of so of course it was snappier. So out of what I thought a stupid action turned into a plus all round.

Never did get the ISA sound card going, I tried a couple other 16-bit pnp ISA ones as well. I'm betting if I pull the usb card out and replace it with pci sound card it would be detected right off the bat. So who in their right mind in 1997 put two ISA cards on a mobo when the pci ones are obviously far better.

Well that is the end of the tail. If anyone has any similar tales you are quite welcome to share them in this thread.

Peace out.