tsiolkovksy log.

I’m tickled pink about all the visitors around this site. Thank you for coming! I’m really happy you’re here; please feel free to drop me a line or twitter me and let me know how it’s going.

I started writing about the computers under my care really for just one reason: so that I would have some record of what I’d done, so I could stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

I don’t know if I’ve accomplished that, exactly, but at least it’s been entertaining watching me try.

Since many of you are new around here, and this is an admittedly quirky personal site, let me point you towards some other computer logs that may interest you:

Commissioned

The following computers are currently in service.

• Eöl, my new Black MacBook running OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard).

  Eöl replaced Vinyamar.

• Tsiolkovsky, my wife’s Toughbook W2, continues to crunch numbers and hang in there, despite losing the “B” key to a toddler-related accident a few weeks ago. The lower left hand side keyboard is also starting to have some problems, but there are no new issues to report with Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

  Tsiolkovsky is slated for replacement in the next few weeks.

• Hithlum, my 17” PowerBook G4, is as lovely and elegant as ever, even if her PPC chip is getting a little long in the tooth. She still does great work, however, and is running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger).
• An unnamed Thinkpad T43, my work computer, runs Windows XP and is completely uninteresting to me as a computer. My company gave it to me to work with, I work with it. End of story.
• Tigana, a Sony Vaio 505-TR running Red Hat 7.2, has a busted power supply and no battery power. I will need to wipe the hard drive before I can consider her decommissioned.

Speaking of which…

Decommissioned

These computers have left the building:

• Vinyamar, my Macbook Air, went through two revisions before being sent back to Apple.
• Al-Rassan / Ithilien, a Thinkpad 1400 running SuSE 9.x.
• Arbonne (I) / Sarantium / Atlantis / Lórien, a beige 750MHz Pentium III tower I picked up from CompUSA which ran Windows 98, Windows 2000, and more Linux distributions than I really care to remember.
• Arbonne (II) and Gorhaut, two identical Linux towers who ran Red Hat 9.

You will no doubt notice certain themes in the names.

Each computer has its own category, some with more information than others. Hopefully you’ll find something you like.

Thanks again for visiting!

Cheers,
Brett

In a strange display of synchronicity, Merrystar and I both ordered new laptops in the last 24 hours.

• Merrystar’s beloved Panasonic Toughbook W2 Tsiolkovsky will soon be joined by, of all things, a Dell XPS M1330. The Panasonic rep really blew the sale and couldn’t get her either a W or Y series within her department’s budget, so she opted for a screamin’ fast dual 2.6GHz instead. After years of making ugly laptops, Dell seems to have finally gotten this one right.

  We’ll see how it looks in person when the Alpine White version (with pink hard drive and mouse, naturally) arrives later this week.

  I’m actually really excited to see how Ubuntu runs on it.

• I wasn’t planning on upgrading my Powerbook G4 Hithlum until its AppleCare expired in November, but the recent release of the iPhone SDK (which requires an Intel chip and Leopard to use) accelerated my timetable. The 1.67GHz Powerbook is the fastest G4 chip out there, but it’s now the punchline in recent Mac benchmarks.

  Let’s call it like it is: the G4 is dog slow running Leopard, and it’s not that much faster running Tiger.

  So, after convincing myself to get the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, I then did an about-face when I got to the ordering page, decided to embrace constraints, and bought what meets my needs now: the Macbook Air. Yes, the one I was waffling about.

  And you know what? I don’t regret it for a minute. $1000 less, featherweight, and fewer distractions? Done.

  It arrives next week.

While I’ll let you know initial impressions and put up new computer pages next week, Merrystar and I have important decisions to make while we wait.

Namely, what are we going to name them? A quick nomenclature refresher:

• Merrystar has two possible conventions to follow: laptop or dual-core. Laptops are named after science vessels in Star Trek: Oberth-class or Nova-class. (I think Nebula-class vessels are also allowed.) Dual-core machines are Excelsior-class. There’s a lot of options available.

• My convention is to use lands from science-fiction and fantasy: Macs use the lands of J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve been going through a Beleriand phase, but might shift east over the Misty Mountains if the names are right. The areas of Númenor are also options, but not very melodic ones.

Hmmm. Lots of thinking to do here.

I find it funny that in all the polarizing posts about the MacBook Air, the reasons why I didn’t recommend it to Merrystar are conspicuously absent.

Those reasons? Compared to her current laptop, the MacBook Air:

1. is heavier,
2. has a bigger footprint,
3. has a shorter battery life, and
4. is more expensive.

And for her, these are critical requirements. So the MBA is a no-go.

The MacBook Air looks to be a great, small Mac. It may be the best little Mac ever, although I think the iPhone is strong competition for that title.

It is not, however, the best subcompact notebook available right now. The MacBook Air needs to shed some weight and stretch some battery life before it can claim that. And since I’m talking about an Ubuntu to OS X switch, yes, this matters quite a bit.

I am confident that the MacBook Air will improve. Solid state drives will get cheaper, faster, and bigger, components will improve, etc. — but it’s just not there yet. But once you remove the necessity of running OS X, the field opens up… and there are honestly better options out there right now.

If you want the lightest, smallest Mac laptop you can get, then obviously the Air is a great machine. The protests about sealed batteries and non-expandable drives are pretty silly and you should ignore them as such. You want the SSD? Don’t worry about the cost, just go and get it (and please provide benchmarks for the rest of us!)

But if you want something even smaller, and aren’t committed to OS X, then you should probably keep looking.

Trip was playing with his dvdvdvdeees tonight when he saw that Merrystar was on her computer. He walked over, climbed up on the couch, and looked over her shoulder.

Her: “That’s Noah, and that’s his mommy.”

Him: “Dats Noah, and dats his mommy.”

Her: “Would you like to see pictures of Trip?”

Him: Makes agreeing noises. Merrystar calls up his site.

Him: “Backhoeses!”

And then he reached out and tried to swipe the page on Merrystar’s Toughbook, just like it was an iPhone.

Me: “You’re going the wrong way.”

Her: “You hush.”

Him: “Boats! T-t on the boat!” more swiping motions, more of the page not going the right way.

I find it both wonderful and a little scary that my son knows that much about using my iPhone already.

Epilogue

After Trip had gone to sleep, we had the following exchange:

Me: “Finally, I found something your computer can’t do.”

Her: Swipes at my laptop screen. “Doesn’t look like yours can, either.”

Have I ever come out ahead in these?

Don’t answer that.

Here’s a question: what goes chirp, chirp, CRUNK, chrip chrip, crunk chirp?

If you guessed Tsiolkovsky’s hard drive, you’d be sadly correct.

First, the Ubuntu side gave us this wonderful message:

I think this is really quite an excellent way to put it: “…and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to risk your time and data upon it.” Good advice for a bad situation.

Then, tonight, the Windows side gave us this gem:

Less informative, but just as ominous.

(Fortunately, Tsiolkovsky is still under Panasonic’s excellent warranty. But only for six more weeks.)

Merrystar’s finished restoring Tsiolkovsky to operating condition, having installed obscure dependencies required for 30-year-old astronomical software and restored data from the ill-fated HissyDrive backup fiasco.

And because of Ubuntu, it’s turned out much better than before. No, honest.

• The Windows XP side of Tsiolkovsky suffered chronic driver crashes from the on-board Centrino wireless card; only disabling the card and using a Netgear pc card stopped the computer from crashing. The drawback was, of course, that the power consumption was huge and battery life was cut in half, if not more. Ubuntu natively recognized and supported the Centrino A/B card, so we’re back up to the 6-8 hour battery life we were used to. (Yes, you read that right.)

• Speaking of power management, Ubuntu fully supports ACPI; hibernate and suspend work like they’re supposed to. Amazing!

• While some of the package managment is confusing (especially the contents of the devel packages, and what’s up with not including make?) apt-get is vastly superior to SuSE’s yast. Sorry, but it’s true.

• Gnome seems to be trying to integrate the best UI elements of Mac OS X and Windows XP (albeit without all the chrome of Tiger/Vista), and succeeds. How well? Good enough to convince a long-time KDE user to switch.

• System stability, good UI, and unix commands at the ready? You better believe that Merrystar never boots into Windows anymore. While there are a few reasons to keep the partition (Adobe Illustrator, for one, and some web-based tools that require IE), it sees little to no system time. Quite a change, actually.

So, I confess. I’ve grown a little bit jealous. I want a brown system! I want to see the OS that Just Works! I want to use it!

Oh, wait. I run Mac OS X and have all of that, minus the brown part. Okay, I really just want to tinker around with Linux again… but know better than to mess up Merrystar’s system this close to Valentine’s day. So I downloaded Xubuntu for PowerPC and ran it on Hithlum, instead. (I’ve long been interested in the XFCE window manager.)

It was nice: fast, UNIX-y, snappy. Not as nice as OS X, but I can now say I’ve gotten Linux to boot on my Mac without frying the system. I could get used to it. But then I remembered that I really didn’t need to do any of this. I have a perfectly good OS now, and I don’t need to go re-learn Linux ‘just because.’ Ubuntu is pretty simple and looks to be low-maintenance, so my technical support duties will likely be light now. Aside from helping to clean up the Windows partition — a reinstall may be in order, because, you know, the Registry doesn’t scale — I’m out of a job on that computer.

Bravo, Ubuntu. It Just Works, like it’s supposed to. Nicely done.

Merrystar upgraded Tsiolkovsky to Ubuntu today from SuSE 10.0. Normally, I wouldn’t phrase a distro change as an upgrade, but this one qualified. Even though my first experience with SuSE was positive, the honeymoon was soon over, and recent events have been less than satisfactory. (Then there’s that whole Novell-Microsoft deal that still makes me go Whaaaa?)

Initial impressions of Ubuntu are very, very good. Wireless works out of the box, power management is great, and “Gnome doesn’t suck,” to quote the primary user. More details once we resolve the hissing backup disk drive issues (note to self: why did I not get out my noise cancelling headphones today?) and AIPS is functioning again; Tsiolkovsky’s Linux writeup could use some refreshing, especially considering how many hits it receives every day.

Did I forget to mention that Hithlum is back from Apple? I guess I did. Well, she’s back, but can’t read any data from the hissy drive, and if you think I’m letting Tsiolkovsky anywhere near that thing? Steve Jobs is more likely to use a stylus.

I know enough to not tempt computer karma: copy the data off the hissy drive as fast as the network will carry it, but don’t mess with the settings.

One small victory today is enough.

It’s now been 19 days since my PowerBook G4 Hithlum’s LCD failed. Let’s recap.

• Times I have called Apple: 8
• Times I have spoken to an Apple rep over the phone: 3
• Times I have emailed Apple: 1
• Emails I have received from Apple: 1
• Times I have visited an Apple store, 160 miles away: 1
• Status updates received from Apple via website: 1
• Hours spent waiting for Genius Bar Appointment: 1
• Escalations through customer service: 3
• ETA: still pending.

• Approximate time spent dealing with support-related issues: 20 hours
• Days primary personal computer unavailable: 19

Let’s compare and contrast with Merrystar’s experience with Panasonic and her Toughbook Tsiolkovsky, shall we?

• Total calls to support: 1
• Total calls to Fedex: 1
• Total emails: 2, both status updates from Panasonic’s logistics company
• Total website visits: 2 (1 to look up phone number for inital call, 1 to FedEx to confirm delivery)

• Approximate time spent dealing with support-related issues: 1.5 hours, including packaging (excludes backup time.)
• Days primary personal computer unavailable: 2.5

The Panasonic support rep was knowledgable, efficient, and thorough. The Apple reps — with the execption at the Genius Bar, to be fair — have not.

What’s worse is that I’m paying $350 to Apple for this service for 3 years. Panasonic’s cost? $0 for the same period of time. I’ve used it three times and each time has been this easy.

This is seriously leading me to question my next laptop purchase. Perhaps it’ll be time to switch back to Linux?

Merrystar’s Toughbook W2 Tsiolkovsky is back from the shop today. She sent it in on Tuesday. In the afternoon. Got it back today. 3 days from door to door.

Panasonic’s support continues to impress.

Apple’s? Not so much. (15 days and counting. I called their support again today, and they have no idea what part is needed or when it will be in. Sigh.)

Oh dear.

So, whatever good computer karma I have have acquired by religiously backing up my own data was negated yesterday when I tried to back up Merrystar’s data.

Last night was spent rebuilding her partition table — by hand, mind you — and then reinstalling Linux on Tsiolkovsky.

If you’re wondering how a backup could have gone so wrong that it would require rebuilding a partition table, well, that makes two of us.

(Fortunately, there is a backup of the drive now.)

Helping Merrystar get Flash off of Tsiolkovsky when I ran across this page on the Adobe/Macromedia site: How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control

Due to recent enhancements with the Flash Player installers, you are now only able to uninstall by using the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller (below). To uninstall Flash Player, simply download the appropriate uninstaller for your system and follow the instructions listed below.

When did they stop including an uninstaller in their distribution???

Merrystar has taken over Hithlum (my 17” PowerBook) for a project she is working on. It’s always amusing to watch her using it, because it is wider than she is. The proportions are all wrong.

Some of this is due to her own choice in laptops; her 12” Panasonic W2 (Tsiolkovsky) is very small, very light, and very well suited to her size. (Very pretty, too! she will no doubt add, when she reads this.) Merrystar has an excellent sense of proportion.

Which is why, as I’m now using Tsiolkovsky, I am left wondering two things:

1. How can she put up with these god-awful jaggedy non-anti-aliased fonts?
2. How do I put up with them every day at work and not notice them?

Don’t believe that they’re a problem? Let’s review.

Exhibit A:

Here is how this site looks on Hithlum using Safari. The font is different (Lucida Grande), but even with the default Trebuchet MS, the anti-aliasing and smoothing is really apparent.

Exhibit B:

Now, the same site, but on Tsiolkovsky using Firefox. Notice the jagged fonts.

Can you see the difference? Does it bother you?

In Merrystar’s case, and I’m completely speculating here, it’s that she spends most of her day using Linux, so Window’s font display is on par with the environment she’s comfortable with. Or, and this may be more likely, Windows is so alien that it just fades into the background of strangeness. It is very odd living with someone who doesn’t equate CTRL-X/C/V instinctively with the Cut/Copy/Paste sequence. (When I asked her how to paste just now, she couldn’t answer until I specified the program and OS.)

In my case, I think it’s because there’s such a division between my work and personal computer use. Everything is different between the environments; not just the OS and hardware, but the sites I go to, the applications I use, everything is different. I assume that the sites I read at night just look better.

Isn’t that odd?

I’ve tried changing some of the display settings on Tsiolkovsky to make it better. Changing smoothing in the Display Control Panel from Standard to ClearType helps, but turns all the type fuzzy. I can see why it’s not the default.

Were properly-proportioned fonts part of my decision to switch to a Mac? Not at all. Is it one of the small things that turns me into a passionate user of my glorified screwdriver?

You betcha.

(Merrystar, are you done yet? I miss my fonts.)

Wireless is now working on the Linux side of Tsiolkovsky. How, you ask?

I upgraded my router to an Airport Express and it worked. Buh-bye, D-Link DI-524!

(Now if only bluetooth would work again, my happiness would be complete.)

I finally had had enough of trying to get Linux to work on 6-year old equipment. The problems I’d been having with Arbonne were the last straw. So, last weekend I went out (with Merrystar’s encouragement) and got a Powerbook (17-inch) and couldn’t be happier with it.

Of course, my network decided to retaliate against the interloper:

• My POS replacement wireless router (D-Link DI-524, which I do not recommend) stopped talking to the cable modem. Hours wasted with hard resets and reprogramming and more hard resets finally resulted in a working internet connection.

• I rebooted Arbonne to restore her wireless connection - yes, I know that you shouldn’t have to reboot a Linux box, but this is the only thing that worked to solve whatever Netgear MA301 - DI-524 wierdness was going on - and she lost her boot loader on the reboot. Four days later, with numerous attempts at installing from the same CDs that would work on Tsiolkovsky, I dragged her upstairs and did a network install of SuSE 10.0.

• Tsiolkovsky’s upgrade? Not so good. Installer barfed in the middle and the computer was down for a frantic 24 hours as I tried to restore the bootloader so Merrystar could use the Windows partition.

• While playing around with the bluetooth on the Powerbook, I wiped my phone’s address book clean. Oops.

That was last weekend, which I am never doing again. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Anyhow:

• Tsiolkovsky has been upgraded from RHEL 3.0 to SuSE 10.0 OSS. USB now works, though the wireless and automounter are still flaky. The Windows partition is now readable in Linux, which is a huge improvement.

• Arbonne has been converted into a headless server (no monitor, no desktop manager, no graphical environment) and has been renamed Lórien accordingly. Lórien is running SuSE 10.0 OSS, and her network problems continue - I couldn’t get the D-Link G card working at all, and the MA301 continues to fight with the wireless router. Also, I misbought a second 250GB drive, so I’m still running the 40GB drive for /. and the 250GB for /data. Oh, and I can’t access the internet from her for more than 10 seconds after boot with the wireless card. Grumble.

• Hithlum is my new Powerbook. She’s purty. I had originally named her Hísilómë, but all the accents didn’t translate well in the scripts and shells.

• My phone address updated flawlessly once I imported my contacts from Outlook to Address Book.app.

• Tigana remains as she ever has, running Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.3. She slept through the whole debacle.

Finally getting over a bad cold I got in St. Louis last weekend. A few (geek-related) updates:

• A problem with the photo site that cropped up in the last few days has been fixed; Michal updated some of the apache security modules and a misspelling in my .htaccess file was no longer passed over with equanimity. If you’re still having problems, you may need to restart your browser session.

• Most of my recent activity has been over at Trip’s site, not here, but there’s been an intermittent problem with connections to the photo galleries on Arbonne dropping without reason. I suspect that the cause is some incompatibility with the Netgear MA301 wireless PC card and the new D-Link D524 wireless router I recently got, some wonky problem that will take weeks to find. Restarting network services doesn’t restore the connection; a full reboot is required, which is ridiculous. So I went out and got a faster D-Link card that I’ll upgrade to eventually.

• Speaking of upgrading Arbonne, I got another 250GB hard drive so that I can increase the size of my RAID 1 array from 40GB to 150 or so. (I back up other computers on my Arbonne, so this will function as further backup for them.) I’ve pretty much filled up the 40GB with my CD collection and photo galleries. However, as this upgrade involes the disk with the OS on it, I’m much more worried. Should I copy everything and restore it? Copy some and upgrade to SuSE 9.3? Fresh install time? Questions, questions. I’m sure I’ll dither about this for some time and then do a fresh install.

• The move to a G network has gone smoothly, for the most part. I installed a print server — why did I wait so long to do that? — and the new G cards work well. I still have problems with Tsiolkovsky’s built-in Centrino A/B card, but that’s Intel’s fault. No news on the RHEL 3 → FC 4 conversion; now that Merrystar’s back at work, I’m reluctant to touch any machine that actually works.

And that’s all the network news.

Merrystar and Trip are spending the week down in Williamsburg at her parents, where my son is discovering the joys of ceiling fans in every room. So I’m on my own for a few days.

Pop quiz:

1) I am amusing myself by:

• A) Burritos!
• B) Blasting ABBA and Pantera!
• C) Watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The 13th Warrior, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country!
• D) Editing my photo albums!
• E) All of the above!

2) I am supposed to be:

• A) Getting some sleep.
• B) Filing old paperwork.
• C) Cleaning the house, or at least my office.
• D) Installing a new Linux distribution.
• E) Pimping my ride.

3) I miss:

• A) Merrystar.
• B) Trip.
• C) Both Merrystar and Trip.
• D) Chicken Pie.
• E) All of the above.

4) Things I really shouldn’t be considering, but am anyway:

• A) Pimping Merrystar’s ride.
• B) Converting Trip’s baby monitor into a house-wide stereo system.
• C) Dessert.
• D) Installing another Linux distro on Tsiolkovsky.
• E) Driving 4 hours “just to check in on the baby.”

Does anyone actually need an answer key for this?

To noone’s surprise but my own, I ended up downloading Fedora Core 4 anyway this weekend. Merrystar’s work computer is still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which still hasn’t fixed the USB problems that prevent the wireless from working, which in turn diminishes the machine’s utility tenfold.

Maybe I should download SuSE 9.3 — just in case.

While burning Fedora Core 3 disks for Merrystar’s lab, I cleaned up my docs page a bit and updated the entry on Tsiolkovsky.

Now that’s the Linux I’ve come to love.

Whilst upgrading Tsiolkovsky from RHEL 3 to SuSE 9.1: Serial ATA problems! No patch available!

Sheesh.

My dearest Merrystar,

I love thee so much that I will spend my evenings trying to get your wireless card working under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, then trying to get the USB pen drive recognized under RHEL 3, and then trying to get an ethernet connection under RHEL 3.

And when that fails, I will direct thee to the following websites, to download drivers, and tarballs, and other assorted installation items, so that even though I could not aid thee in thy quest for wireless access under the great bloated behemoth that is really Red Hat Linux 9, but rebranded and patched for a $179 license that your employer would rather pay, I will present thee with divers instructions as to how I think you can install ndiswrappers around the included Windows drivers and activate your divinely sweet portable computing device’s intrinsic radio networking capabilities.

Why? Because I love thee, my darling, my beloved, and nothing - not even the havoc that Red Hat hath wreaked upon our lives - will keep me from faithfully serving you, my angel, my evening star, my ashke. I will be thy Teleporno, thy Celeborn, grandson of Elmo the ticklish, for all the days of my life. Except without the dirty name.

And now, the promised instructions.

1. Download the NdisWrapper tarball.
2. Locate the windows drivers for the Intel Pro 2100 3B wireless card. These are either on the original source CDs that came with Tsiolkovsky, or you can get them from the web at ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/TravelMate_80x/driver/winxp/intel2100b.zip.
3. Follow the installation instructions.
4. Configure the wireless card according to some of the notes on the distros page. I would set wlan0 to eth1. You’ll need to specify both the WEP key (in /etc/syconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth1 and ifcfg-eth1) and ESSID, but I’ll send those to you under separate cover.
5. Ping rice.edu.
6. Do a little happy dance if it works.

Love,
Your Luke

Sometimes, I amaze myself with my stupidity. It masquerades as stubbornness, but really it’s stupidity.

See, to celebrate all my recent work in my garden I decided to see if my computer kung-fu had improved any and try to get Tigana back in tip-top shape. For those following allong at home, she had the following problems:

• Installing any windows update causes a catastophic OS crash, requiring hours of reinstalling DLLs to fix.
• The left mouse button no longer works, so we use a small optical USB mouse now. However, Red Hat 7.2 doesn’t support USB mice.
• The wireless card works normally under Windows, and can work under Red Hat, but not with WEP enabled.
• Any recent Linux installation (Red Hat 9, Fedora X, even Slackware 10) runs into problems with the PCMIA CD-ROM drive on the 505TR. The web advice (assigning an ide2 value) hasn’t worked.
• The ‘T’ key is loose and comes off every once in a while.

So, because I’m an idiot, I though I should spend some time actually trying to *fix* these problems. Stupid, stubborn, idiot. I decided to tackle the problems one at a time, first reinstalling the Windows partition. This did not go well. Not that it went poorly, but it took about 4 hours all told, and then before I connected to the internet I reinstalled Norton Personal Firewall.

NPF worked for all of one boot before an error dialog kindly informed me that my security settings were all FUBARed and I should reinstall the software. I did so. Twice. Thrice. Five times I reinstalled that software, eventually deleting every Symantec-related file I could find.

No luck.

So here I am, stuck without a firewall on an unpatched win2k box. I know that there’s no way I can patch it fast enough before it’s compromised. So I turn to my old nemesis, ZoneAlarm. I download it quickly, turn off the wireless card, and get it set up and running. So far, so good.

Then I notice that the USB mouse - you know, the one that’s required to make the damn machine work - is flaking out and freezing up. The touchpad still works fine, but not the external mouse.

While I’m running Windows Update I check it out on the web, and sure enough other people have had problems with ZoneAlarm causing USB weirdness. I don’t know which I’m more pissed off at now - ZoneAlarm, for making such an intrusive program, or Microsoft, who shipped Win2K without a firewall. It’s perhaps the only benefit I see to running Windows XP.

So now I’m presented with a dilemma; firewall and flaky mouse, or no firewall, insecure box, but a working mouse. These are not the sort of choices I like to make. So I turn to the Linux side to see if maybe I can salvage some shreds of adminisrative dignity. (The smart admin would have gone outside and built another garden bed. I’m not so smart.)

The WEP appears to not work because the Wireless Exensions package is version 11, and I need version 15. That appears at least fixable, with a little research. The USB problem likely requires rebuilding the kernel, which I don’t have the source code for. But I remain hopeful that if I can upgrade the distro, it’ll all work out.

Of course, every disro I tried - with the exception of Red Hat 7.2, which is already on Tigana - failed to load the proper CD-ROM driver and barfed the install. Some of them (Fedora, cough, cough) spewed code all over the screen before I terminated Anaconda. Others just sat there and waited… and waited… and waited…

Got old, quick.

All the while I’m lusting after Tsiolkovsky, happily playing DVDs right next to me in bed. Is that wrong?

Dealing with computers is so unsatisfying.

In honor of the new computer on the network, I’ve updated my old network document.

Merrystar’s new computer (“Tsiolkovsky,” what a great name!) arrived today, so:

Fedora Core Linux on a Panasonic CF-W2