The Globe and Mail has a follow up column about the travails of installing Linux and making it useful in an officey way. This is very much in line with my own continuing attempt to get Linux to work for me.

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Adelphia cable modem, meet Linksys 802.11b wireless access point router. Router, meet cable modem. Now that you’re old friends, allow me to introduce Linksys 802.11b card. Oh, you don’t get along with him? Then you’ll definitely hate his more powerful sibling, the 802.11g card.

Put aside the G card; even when it works, it’s much slower than B. Before I can get online with B, I have to go through a ritualistic dance for at least 40 minutes. Some combination of rebooting the three devices, doing “ipconfig /renew”s until the cows come home, and clicking on the 105 Windows dialog boxes that use redundant terminology for non-redundant operations and non-redundant terminology for redundant operations, and maybe it works. For a while.

It’s simpler than it used to be, but it’s still not right.

I know my anger is misplaced. Wifi is good. Wifi is kind. Wifi is understanding. It’s Windows and Linksys and maybe Adelphia who are devouring my time and good will and replacing my usual beneficent smile with a fanged snarl. Or maybe it’s my antivirus software, my mouse, or possibly just my karma. (I knew I shouldn’t have kicked that dog in Babylonia.)

O, where is the page that gives step-by-step instructions based on the specific symptoms? I know you’re out there somewhere…

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Paul Philp writes about how an outage can show you the difference between a machine and a network.

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Good news in the continuing the Linux installation saga: I’m now using my Linux box as a tunes server. Well, actually, all I’ve done is move my mp3s onto it and am playing them through xmms.

The slightly impressive bit is that Mandrake’s samba recognized the mini-drive I have plugged into a USB port on my XP laptop, so I’m now copying 10 gigabytes of MP3s over to the linux machine. Plus, Mandrake’s xmms actually plays mp3’s, unlike RedHat’s that was scared off by patent uncertainties.

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Hanan Cohen points us to a translation of a Microsoft ad that appeared in Israeli newspapers that pretty much comes out and says that if you don’t have a licensed professional install your legal copy of XP, the operating could destroy your hardware.

Well, I guess it’s good of them at last to warn us…

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Hossein Derakhshan writes:

As you might already know, Iranian government has finally filtered my weblog.

I’ve written something about how a “peer-to-peer RSS reader” can fight Net censorship in Iran and other closed societies.

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I seem to have a good solution to my problem of not having a reliable SMTP for sending mail while I’m on the road. After trying the free hotPop for a few days, I found it to be unreliable, and I heard from some of you that your ISPs block mail from that domain. So, on your recommendation I’ve switched to FastMail. It costs $15.00, but it’s been working like a dream. Plus, I’m generally in favor of paying for services on the Net.

Thanks for sharing your collective experience.

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I’m away from home for 2 weeks and the free SMTP server I’d been using – softhome.com – seems to have gone belly up. Does anyone know of a reliable free server I can use to send email via Outlook? I just signed up for HotPOP but it’s succeeding at sending mail about one in ten times. H-e-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l-lp!

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Ok, I’m up and running in Mandrake, using kde as my desktop. So far so good…

The only hitch I hit when installing Mandrake was that it asked me for a CD that I didn’t have. I thought it must have been the third CD in the set, but I downloaded it twice and burned the image 3 times and it still wouldn’t accept it.
So, I finally said to just skip it, which it did without complaint. I think it might have been internationalization settings.

The kde desktop looks pretty and the file browser is modeled on Windows Explorer, which isn’t a bad thing. Since I’m writing this entry from the linux desktop, I am apparently connected fine.

It looks like it’s playing mp3’s, which I couldn’t get the RedHat distribution to do. Of course, I don’t hear any sound, but the file is generated a graphic sound wave in the xmms player, so that’s pretty much the same thing as hearing it, isn’t it? I refuse to be stopped by details!

The Mandrake Control center tells me that it didn’t install samba, required to see the Windows machines on my network. Hmm. I could have sworn that I checked that box during the installation process. Well, it’s installing samba now. And it’s found the folders on my XP laptop. Cool!

And now it’s lost them. Oh well, it was cool for a moment…Wait, they’re back!…But it can only see the directories…But it’s auto-configured the fstab file…. Alternating fits of coolness…

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Since I’ve been setting up linux on a spare machine simply as a way to explore linux from the point of view of a desktop user, and since I’ve been having problems with the RedHat 9 desktop environment, I decided to start all over with a clean install of Mandrake‘s linux distribution, including letting it redo the partitioning. Clean sweep, baby!

So far the installation has gone pretty easily (he said jinxing himself). I hit a bump at the beginning, but I can’t blame Mandrake for that. I’d downloaded the CD images and burned them last night. They’re readable in Windows and RedHat could see the files, but my linux machine wouldn’t boot from them. (It also wouldn’t boot from the Mandrake floppy booter I’d made. Odd.) So, I installed a new CD reader, and now it’s working fine. (So far.) It does make you wonder if the instability of the RedHat install was related to the flakiness of my CD player, although I’d be happier about that if it were crashing when it was accessing CDs.

Anyway, Mandrake has asked me the expected questions. This time I’m not being stingy about which packages it’s installing. It says I have 13 minutes to go…

Previous linux entry is here.

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