[Sussex] How to recover from a complete "balls up" ??

[John D.]

Well, further to John Crowhursts' efforts for point me in the right 
direction & various others who have assisted in this and various other 
similar threads posted by me recently,

I've managed to persuade "Clare" that I had to "bite the bullet" ( ;-) ) 
and have now installed mandrake (temporarily) and dumped windows XP 
completely.

The current intention is to finish downloading the latest knoppix and 
install that to my hard drive, then using the Hampshire Lug wiki guide 
that Thomas Adam kindly posted and modify it so that it becomes "proper" 
debian. Which I feel should help my learning curve some!

Sure, I appreciate that getting a debian install like that is cheating a 
little, but installing "it" properly is still (and I hope, will remain) 
over my head. After all, the knoppix hardware detection IMO knocks 
anything that debian have, well and truly into "a cocked hat" (perhaps, 
like British Rail and debian stable, "they'll" get there eventually :D ).

While at the same time, my actions are likely to generate a barrage of 
stupid questions, because this'll mean that I'll have to get samba 
configured as a priority - so that Clare doesn't give me absolute hell 
about lack of access to the printers (more of that later).

I'm also gonna have to get the latest Crossover Office, so that if she 
has too, she can still use Orifice 2k (familiarity, school 
compatibility, etc etc), but as it's only about a score, it's a price 
worth paying.

Thanks for everyones assistance thus far!

regards

John D.