Back to my regular laptop.....
Mar. 21st, 2008 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1I just noticed that the post I made a few hours ago is dated March 19, 4:50pm -- the time and date of the system clock at the time I posted. That obviously wasn't right, and it's been fixed.
I went to Panera for dinner, with the Linux laptop in tow. I was able to detect their wireless internet, but I couldn't connect to it. I tried several times. I think there's something more I need to do before it will work. (At home, I can detect my neighbors' wireless connections, and all but one have them locked down.)
As for the boycott, I sort of participated. I read the posts of the people who chose not to participate, but I didn't start responding until about 4 pm. Plus today's posts are the first I made since Monday.
In the past week, I've been focusing my attention on the Linux laptop. It's working quite well, but less than perfect. The system clock is losing time, which tells me the internal battery may need replacing (if I can find it). The battery pack doesn't hold a charge at all. Sometimes the 8|i|k|,|=|] keys don't work.
As for Linux, the install went smoothly, but I've not been able to get the modem or wireless PCMCIA cards to work. I like the OS, and it comes with some decent games (I can't beat the computer at Othello or Connect Four). But it isn't plug-and-play, which IMO wouldn't make it a viable candidate for a neophyte or average computer user -- especially one that's used to Windows.
I went to Panera for dinner, with the Linux laptop in tow. I was able to detect their wireless internet, but I couldn't connect to it. I tried several times. I think there's something more I need to do before it will work. (At home, I can detect my neighbors' wireless connections, and all but one have them locked down.)
As for the boycott, I sort of participated. I read the posts of the people who chose not to participate, but I didn't start responding until about 4 pm. Plus today's posts are the first I made since Monday.
In the past week, I've been focusing my attention on the Linux laptop. It's working quite well, but less than perfect. The system clock is losing time, which tells me the internal battery may need replacing (if I can find it). The battery pack doesn't hold a charge at all. Sometimes the 8|i|k|,|=|] keys don't work.
As for Linux, the install went smoothly, but I've not been able to get the modem or wireless PCMCIA cards to work. I like the OS, and it comes with some decent games (I can't beat the computer at Othello or Connect Four). But it isn't plug-and-play, which IMO wouldn't make it a viable candidate for a neophyte or average computer user -- especially one that's used to Windows.
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Ubuntu 7.10 and wireless
Date: 2008-03-22 06:19 pm (UTC)Making Ubuntu work with Wireless is a bit of work. Steps are:
Install NDiswrapper
Use NDiswrapper to install the Windows wireless card drivers
Install Wifi Radar
Use Wifi Radar to set up the wireless network
It's a bit of a pain, but once you've got it up and running it's rock solid, in effect the Windows drivers work better with Linux and NDswrapper than they do with XP. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but I've seen this on several computers running different versions of Linux. My personal guess is that the Wireless setup thing in XP is badly written, but that's just a guess.
Re: Ubuntu 7.10 and wireless
Date: 2008-03-24 01:41 pm (UTC)I think the reason the drivers work better with Linux is that Unix was designed to be a networked system, whereas networking was "after-the-fact" with Windows.
Re: Ubuntu 7.10 and wireless
Date: 2008-03-24 04:36 pm (UTC)Never mind; I answered my own question. I found the wifi-radar package on packages.ubuntu.com, downloaded it to a flash drive, and will install it this evening.