I’m happy to report that Dogpile now lists a total of 51 hits for “ragesoss” on the major search engines, up from less than 10 in the not-too-distant past.
As for the desktop woes, they do indeed continue, but things are mostly OK. Apparently it’s a hardware defect in my processor (the northbridge, to be specific) that is causing my remaining memory errors. But I got some really great advice for free (and pretty quickly) from the Open Tech Support forums. Definitely a site worth checking out when you run into computer problems.
Meanwhile, I did yet another reinstallation of Linux, this time Ubuntu. Definitely the easiest install I’ve had yet, and there are some features that make actually using it quite a bit better than than basic Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based), particularly a graphical installer program that lets you select software to install from a menu. Unfortunately, the networking that worked instantly before won’t work with this installation, despite some monkeying with settings. Overall, Linux definitely has a long way to go in terms of user friendliness before it becomes an acceptable Windows replacement, but from what I can tell it’s closing the gap pretty fast.
I also found out from an IT employee that Yale has a general policy of not revealing the identities of students when copyright enforcers track file-sharing to Yale IPs. They give you a warning, but they don’t stop you from doing it again (and good luck if anyone tries to go up against Yale’s lawyers). And when you log into the Yale Virtual Private Network (which allows access to online journal subscriptions and other secured content) all your internet traffic goes through Yale first. So by using the VPN, a file-sharer can essentially become anonymous. Hypothetically.