A status report of sorts....

[poltr1]

Two weeks after installing Linux on the "new" laptop (a Dell Latitude CPx J), everything is mostly working, except for the PCMCIA modem and wireless cards. I have posts in Ubuntu Forums, but there haven't been many responses to my questions.

To recap: The hardware finds my modem, but the software doesn't. Supposedly there's a driver I can use, but I don't know how to install it. As for the network card, I get the bluse swirl for about 60 seconds while it tries to join a network, and then it stops.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday to ohiblather and to katyhh!

Comments

Ubuntu

[urban-terrorist.livejournal.com]

Well, is there an LUG near you? My experience is that problems like this are from one of two sources:

1) Bad drivers from the hardware OEM - most have lousy Linux support

2) Bad documentation, a lot of what is available assumes that you know what you are doing already

An expert (which I am not) can get just about any hardware working with Linux, and with luck your local LUG will have a bunch of people who can do this sort of setup in their sleep.

Another option is to try Dell - they offer Ubuntu pre-installed on some models, and while this is an older machine it's possible that they might have what you need.

Re: Ubuntu

[poltr1]

The Dayton Microcomputer Association has a Linux Special Interest Group that meets on the third Thursday of every month. It's been a while since they had an evening dedicated to installs.

You're right -- most of the documentation out there is written by programmers and not technical writers, and it's oriented toward other programmers and not end users. In other words, there's a lot of data, but very little information.

Re: Ubuntu

[urban-terrorist.livejournal.com]

Which is great if you are really into Linux, not so great if you are trying to learn. I love Ubuntu, it's one of the greatest operating systems out there, but doing an install on a laptop can be difficult. Desktops are a different matter, on your desktop with a wired connection it's pretty easy. But I bought a laptop about a year and a half ago, and quite frankly I'll never use a desktop as my main computer again, the laptop is so convenient it's incredible.

Re: Ubuntu

[poltr1]

The laptop install was fairly easy, except that I had to repeat it 5 or 6 times. The first few times, I forgot to tell it to use the entire disk. (Otherwise, it kept repartitioning the disk into smaller and smaller segments.) And a couple of times, I had a read/write error, which killed the install process.

If I knew technoshaman or mdlbear any better, I'd ask them for help.

Re: Ubuntu

[urban-terrorist.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sometimes things get interesting . Yah gotta love computers, otherwise it's baseball bat time!