A couple weeks ago I wanted to try out TrixBox (the new name for Asterisk@Home). As far as I understand it's supposed to be a BDI for Asterisk. I still don't like their installer - the instructions on their site don't match the instructions you get when you boot from the disc. When the disc boots, it looks just like the normal installer for Fedora Core or CentOS. The screen says you can pass parameters to the kernel at boot. I usually use the line "linux ide=nodma" to avoid some issue with my hard drive controller or drives that slows things down. So I did the same thing here. And I got a familiar Anaconda Installer. This is the same path I went down with Asterisk@Home and never got anywhere. That's because there are packages listed on the installer screens that can't be installed. Take two (depending where you count from). I follow the online instructions that say to "just press enter". At this point I'm glad that I had disconnected my usual hard drives and replaced them with an older 40GB drive. The installer at that point proceeds as advertised, clears out the drive and installs everything needed to run TrixBox. Wonderful. But why couldn't they build a normal distro so I could use Anaconda and Disk Druid to put TrixBox on my multiboot machine? As it is I'm not likely to go to the effort of plugging that drive back in so I can play around a little more. This brings me to what I was really going to write about today. When I reassembled my desktop, my UPS tripped - the "overload" light came on. I assumed the worst: I shorted some drive's power connector to a ground somewhere. But I didn't smell anything. I unplugged everything from the UPS and turned it on. I got the same result. It turned on, tested itself, then declared there was an overload. Whatever. I didn't have time to deal with it and plugged everything in to the old surge suppressor. Of course we had a 3 second brown out. Somehow this toasted one of my monitors. The power button felt spongy and wouldn't turn on. Great. The funny part is that a couple days ago, after another power outage, my monitor recovered. I came home and there it was saying "no input detected". Sounds like a super-hero origin story... Bruce Parker was an ordinary lab student until lightening hit a spider and... nevermind. If only my UPS were super too.