Nosbig.net

Oh, I love the wireless internet stuff. I just bought a wireless card from Linksys last Thursday, and I got it set up in Linux and an using it right now to surf the 802.11b network at NC State.

Once I got the card added to /etc/pcmcia/config, it bound to the Orinoco driver, and I just pulled up an IP via DHCP. Really slick.

Sitting in the lobby, I an getting about 50KB/s, downloading OpenOffice 1.0.1. Figured it was about time to upgrade.

Next, I will have to update my main box to Debian 3.0 I feel confident enough now that I can get it installed without too much hassle.

Tonight, Mom came home from school with a rather humorous story to tell me. Each day, she has a problem of the day to give her students something to do while she checks their homework.

Today’s problem was:
“John wanted to buy an item that costs $358.72 and decides to mow lawns to earn that money. At $20.00 per lawn, how many lawns would it take John to make enough money to buy his item, and how much would he have left over?”

As she was checking around the room, Mom got to one of her students who asked, in a tiny, little voice, “Mrs. Gibson, how many yards are there in a lawn?”

This week, I bought a laptop. The specs are not bad for a three year old laptop. I installed Linux on it, anyway. It runs very nicely. I figured I could use it this fall during the three hour breaks between my classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. I will come home for one of those per day, most likely. Two trips is not bad, but three each day is really awful. That will kill the gas really quickly.

This week, I finally bought a laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 390e.

Specs:

• Pentium II – 333MHz
• 128 MB SDRAM
• 6.4 GB hard drive
• Neomagic video chipset
• 14.1″ LCD screen
• Built-in 56k modem (Winmodem )
• Included Xircom 10/100 PCCard NIC

All this for only $350. I knew I would be able to install Linux on it, it was just a matter of how completely. Once again, Mandrake comes through. 8.0 installed flawlessly except for the modem. It even detected the modem; they just didn’t include drivers for it. A quick download from a link from www.linmodems.org solved that problem. The only other things I have done to it are changing the sound system from ALSA (which I despise with a passion) to OSS and to update GAIM from the 0.11pre1 version included with 8.0 to the newest version, 0.59.1. Neither sound driver works terribly well (especially for MP3 playback, but well enough for alert sounds and audio CD’s. Besides, this is a laptop, and I don’t want to kill the battery playing MP3’s or DVD’s (if that were available on this laptop).