The last two months I've been having a lot of adventures on computers. Some of them are related to working on the old Power Macs in Patty's Kindergarten class, and some of them are related to helping Charlotte with the Gentoo system on her computer.

Power Macs

Two or three years ago Patty salvaged some Power Macs that other teachers were getting rid of, for her Kindergarten students to use. She found some educational games for them on CDs, and her students use them a lot. This year she wanted them to be able to use them to go to the Compass Learning Odyssey Web site, and to be able to print on the printer connected to her PC. The teachers all have new PCs this year. The iMacs they used last year are for the students to use now.

She has four Power Macs: three are 6250/100 and one is 6250/100 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_5200_LC ).

There were three of them that could go on the Internet, but they kept crashing. Also, the students keep moving system files and changing their names.

I was completely lost in Mac operating systems, and I needed more time to practice and experiment. I found out I could emulate a Mac in Windows on my computer at home, so I did. I Installed the same Mac OS that's on the computers at the school, on my virtual Mac at home, and spent dozens of hours studying and practicing so I could fix the systems at the school, and set them up to do what Patty wanted them to do. Now I'm a Mac wizard. Then I found out that it's impossible to use the Compass Learning Web site on those computers at all.

Gentoo

Charlotte has Gentoo on her computer at home because that's what's on the computers at the lab where she's been working. She was having some troubles with it, so I installed it on my second hard drive to practice using it so I could help her. Fortunately I encountered exactly the same problem she was having starting the desktop, and I found a solution. Of course that was after dozens of hours of study and practice.

Other adventures

While I was working about those projects, I learned a lot about emulators, programs that create a virtual computer and operating system on some other computer and operating system. Now I have a virtual Mac running System 7 in Windows XP on my PC, and a virtual PC running Debian Gnu/Linux, and Debian running in coLinux. I'm on my way to becoming a Debian wizard now.