Hahahaha... lmao... A clear case of caffeine overdose.What part of the above do you not comprehend? It is not for you to dismiss anyone. Don't make references to being an adult and then behave like a child.

Clear case eh? I was seriously going to ignore the expected "I know you are but what am I, yo mama blah blah and the horse you rode in on" but this is just too funny.

You see, I have a serious sleeping disorder. Prior to testing and diagnosis, I handled what I never suspected was a medical condition by self medicating with lots, and lots, and lots of caffeine. Both my Internist and Neurologist were very quick to warn me I needed to get away from the stuff because
1. I was prescribed medication to handle it, and other stimulants were not just unnecessary, but could cause a heart condition.

2. The energy crash that follows when caffeine wears off could, due to my disorder, be severe enough to make me fall asleep unwillingly, perhaps while driving in heavy traffic or operating power tools.

3. The extreme consumption of caffeine was burning holes in my stomach and was also deemed as the cause of my irritable bowel syndrome. If you haven't had the displeasure of knowing what IBS feels like, heat a fork until it's red hot, stab it into your small intestine and twist. Keep that up for about 3 minutes. Oh, and repeat it several times per day. That was my life.

Of course I quit drinking caffeinated beverages. The withdrawal was so bad I was given oxycodone/acetaminophen (Percocet) to handle the headaches and ordered to do nothing but rest for 5 days. I haven't had a drop of anything with caffeine in it for over 2 years and I have no intention on breaking the streak.

So, yes, a clear case. Clear as mud, that is.

I'm done feeding the troll, mods. I promise it's for real this time.

Hooray, finally this chapter is closed.

Oh boy, I should seek treatment for my caffeine addiction before it's too late.
Distro-hopping is another addiction I can't seem to be able to get rid of. Any suggestions for rehab?

I guess I'm just "set in my ways"... Been doing it for too many decades, now. hehehe

Back in the early days of MS-DOS, before Defragmenter was created, it was normal procedure to format C and reinstall everything periodically to maintain performance. Add a couple of botched attempts to upgrade earlier versions of Windows that left the system unusable, well, you get the picture.

Cheers

I really preferred the earlier versions of winblows, when you had to hack around to get your soundcard or cdrom working. Preloading drivers, environment settings in autoexec.bat and config.sys. Ah the good old days

That's a problem? Oh.... (Even I, Mr set-in-my-ways guy. hop around a little: my older laptop runs Slackware) Maybe we should form a support group?

Oh, yeah, the good old days, indeed! And let's not forget about moving device board jumpers to resolve IRQ conflicts, and tweaking HIMEM.SYS and 386.SWP settings to boost performance.

I actually did have fun with it back then, but I can't say I miss it now.
Guess I've grown lazy in my old age...

Cheers

Dora, you are not the only one out here in Linuxland addicted to distro-hopping. I still cannot believe I have not burned out the original hard drive on my year 2000 Dell desktop with the number of distros I have installed, wiped, changed my mind and reinstalled and installed... I was stuck in an endless Do Loop! A brief example of the madness: Kanotix, Knoppix, Debian Etch, PCLinuxOS, various versions of OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Ubuntu...
And, I started to do the same thing to my poor little defenseless EEE PC's SSD drive...
My cure? Buy books like The Suse Linux Toolbox and the Ubuntu Linux Toolbox and start diving deeply under the Linux distro hood. You will start to see that all the distros are but variations on a theme, i.e. the prevailing Linux kernel and that by hopping you are "skimming the surface" but missing the deep water underneath.
So.. pick 1 or 2 distros that appeal to you, stick with them through several versions and learn as many commands as you can from Linux books and you will not want to hop any more.
For the last 6 months or so it has been working for me. And now, I actually understand what commands like dmesg and lsmod mean!!!

freshmeadow, Thanks for the support. I know exactly what you went through. I wore out 3 laptops over the years with relentless formatting, re-formatting, installing, re-installing.
I started with RH 8 or 9.
SuSe, Mandrake/Mandriva in earlier versions.
Slackware since 10 or so.
Debian since Etch. .
FC, Fedora every version except the current one.
Linux Mint, CentOS, PCLinux and several others that I can't even remember.

Currently. I have two Linux workhorses:
- a 2 year old Acer Aspire 3100 with only 512MB of RAM. I installed Debian Lenny on it a few weeks ago. I'm amazed that it still runs so well despite the beatings it took.
. a 1 year old Toshiba satellite U300 with 2GB of RAM which is just enough memory for virtualisation. It took practically a sledge hammer to remove Vista and I'm now running Slackware on it.

This is the way things will remain for a long time. PERIOD...

I'm not afraid of the command line. Went under the hood of Debian and Fedora quite a bit. Slackware, obviously is the ideal distro for learning what it's all about. My only problem is lack of time.
I still see one problem. My subscription to LinuxFormat. I have a pile of DVDs loaded with goodies sitting on my table. Surprinsingly, I share the magazine with a friend but keep the DVDs all to myself.
Next steps, ditching the subscription and tossing the DVDs. Hmmm not sure yet. I'm considering it seriously though. Taking it one step at a time. Eleven steps to go.

i'd recommend a dose of slackware.

edit: looks like you're already there.

lunar cranium, thanks for the encouragement.

No, you don't have a problem. A little Slackware on the side is good for you. Cheers!!

Dora...maybe the ultimate cure for all of us confessed distro hoppers is...Linux From Scratch...

Not for me! While we're confessing addictions, my worst is that I'm slave to binary packages. I'm not lazy, nor do I lack the knowledge to configure and build from source. I just love the ability to type one short line and have a brand new app within minutes, sometimes seconds, that I can fire up and start being productive with.