Thou shall not die

I am referring to this blog which seemed as good as dead. For the past 5 months I have been predominantly a windows user with 1 month spent in the USA for official work where only Windows is used.
My pc self assembled (by my brother) crashed on me in Feb 07. I tried my level best with whatever knowledge I had to somehow start it but to no avail. I was not able to get any display on my monitor and the green light on the CPU stayed on continuously. My first suspicion was it was due to one of the harddisk which had developed bad sectors. Finally I gave up and took help from the local computer dealer. By current standards (considering the cutting edge technology) my box should be called outdated but on a conservative comparison it was a healthy system.

Alas the motherboard had conked. The monitor was working fine. Now i had 2 options, dig out the warranty which is for 2 years or buy a brand new PC. The local shop whom I had approached coaxed me into building new PC. Now I was spoilt for choice as there options galore. Should I go in for a AMD or an Intel a AMD X2 or a Intel C2D(Core 2 Duo), the options and the permutation and combinations were unlimited from the high end to the minimalistic home computer.
I researched extensively on the internet and posted in various forums especially the Digit magazine forum. I also consulted friends who had bought a computer within the last 6 months. 6 months is a long time for electronic and computer hardware, prices had dropped considerably and a pc with a basic Core2Duo processor looked tempting and affordable. Finally my research ended in more of a confused state of mind and I gave in to buy the C2d.
I learnt a lesson though in this process, that with the extensive info found from the internet I could have myself bought these hardware parts and got it assembled from a local guy.
So now I have a spanking new Pc a Intel C2D E6300@1.86ghz 1gig of RAM, 2 SATA HDD of 80gigs each, DVD writer, and a Intel DG965ry mobo.
Alas after using it for 2 days I was enlightened that Linux kernel did not support the DG965ry chipset. Yes , you could make it work with many workarounds or wait for 2 months for the new kernel with this chipset supported. Luckily I was out of station for a month and was not using my computer. In the meantime I waited for new versions of the Linux kernel to be bundled with some distro.
With much trepidation after almost 3 months without Linux I decided to try Ubuntu (the most popular distro according to Distrowatch). I downloaded the desktop cd through torrent and booted with it.
Everything went fine and Ubuntu booted to the desktop. So I had regained confidence and was sure that Ubuntu supported the DG965ry chipset. But this was a live run and now I needed to install it. Here came the question of bootloader. The most widely used bootloader for Linux GRUB was surely there, but I wanted to boot Ubuntu in a alternate way i.e not installing it to the Master Boot Record(MBR) as is the most preferred way.
Now here is where the beauty of open source and free software is, you have options for everything and you are spoilt for choice. After lot of exploring and spending the weekend and trying out many tools, I found GRUB4DOS.
Lo and behold I could boot into Ubuntu without touching the MBR
Right now I am just booting and exploring Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (although I have used linux off and on since 2000) and I will write another post on bootloaders in detail.
This post will hopefully keep my blog alive however trivial it may be in the blogosphere.
I am also using a brand new laptop provided by my office a Dell D820 customized with 4 gb RAM and a 80g HDD. My earlier laptop IBM T41 lies as a standby.