The good news is that I've got the magic "partitionless" RedHat installation functioning reasonably well. This gives me a place to test Perl, C, Python, etc., and practice working on a Linux system.
The bad news is that I managed to forget that the CD-writing software will let you drop files into a place that it won't write them, letting you hang yourself. I managed to lose a bunch of data, particularly some images I was working on and some niceties for my Windows Desktop. All my important stuff is kept in my PFE directory because I'm stupid but lucky, though, so I have most of my important stuff.
The one problem with all of this is my Lucent Winmodem, which RedHat gravely informed me was probably not going to operate with it easily. Research will start immediately to see if I can find a way to make it work at all; short of that, I'll have to try to find a way to transfer files from the "real" Win partition to the "pretend" RedHat partition.
