Notes for my future self: linux

1. Getting Firefox3 working.
Install. Type in about:config, enter network.dns into the filter. Find enter.dns.disable_ipv6 and toggle it to 'true'.
Why: the dsl modem is ipv4-only and can't handle ipv6 dns requests.
(Better fix: get new dsl modem.)

2. Getting Flash working in Firefox3.
Try flash10. If that doesn't work, exit ff3, start from console. ("which firefox", then find the correct directory. Should be /usr/bin/ but if I've installed it, chances are it'll be /usr/src/firefox. Go to directory, ./firefox.) Watch console, browse to youtube. If it throws a pile of glibc-2.4 errors, it's still broken.
Go to Adobe, download the flash9 debugger for linux, untar, go into /debug, find the libflash.so gzip file, untar THAT, and move the libflash.so into /$browser/plugins and it should work.

3. Getting a USB boot install working (in case the machine can boot from usb but can't from CDROM for whatever reason, or just because it's more convenient to use a thumbdrive than carrying a CDROM around.)
The slooooooow way: needs downloaded image, burnt CD, >=1G usb thumbdrive. Run network assistant to make a bootable USB thumbdrive. Wait 6 hours. mount the drive, throw away the 'mepis' folder, then copy the entire .iso image over to the root directory. Go into /boot/grub and edit menu.lst. Add to the boot option you're likely to use, to the second line (the kernel option line) 'fromiso=(isoname).iso fromhd=/dev/sdb1' and it should do fine.
For extra credit, with a multi-gig thumbdrive, make several partitions and install this on one partition (in which case it'll be /dev/sdb(partition number) (although as long as you tell it to look in /sdbX it seems to search them all rather than looking in the old /hda group and crashing horribly.)