blind ibook

the optical drive on my ibook is dead.

I was going to burn a cd today. the drive opened normally, but when I closed the door it didn’t want to latch. once I finally got it to latch, it wouldn’t see the blank cd I had put in. then it wouldn’t eject. got out a pin, stuck it in the manual eject hole, and the display went dark. hmm. eventually got the disc out, and booted up again. tried a few more times, same effect (but thankfully without the apparent crash).

I suspect it’s a side effect of taking it apart to fix the video problem. but I don’t know how to fix it. now I’ll be unable to install linux on it without getting quite creative (currently it has OS X on it, and I had left 10gb of unpartitioned space for ubuntu, but never got around to installing it).

my ultimate plan was to use the ibook, running ubuntu, on astronomy outings, since it suspends/resumes faster (and with less annoying full-bright screen flashes) than the thinkpad.