Technical Hitches
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
I got myself a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, because it was free (and I like that in an operating system).
I tested it, booting Ubuntu from CD, and my aging PC was suddenly given a new lease of life. I can see why people like Linux. I had a scoot around, loved the fact that it seemed simple and responsive, and tried to get online. Nope. Fail.
Boot to Windows XP. Read the help forums. Oh bugger.
It seems that Ubuntu has issues with older wireless cards and the only internet connection I have is wifi. I don't have a choice about that; in this complex it's wifi or nothing. So I read some more.
I've got an older Broadcom card, which is perfectly servicable under Windows but isn't supported by the Ubuntu kernel. There are workarounds, however. I have investigated some. It's been a while since I last used a command line for anything important but it's not intimidating, it's just a pain in the bum to do. So after much reading, it turns out that in order to make this work I need to find drivers, extract vital bits of them, tarball them, rebuild them, run them up a flagpole and dance the Charleston on the night of the full moon.
I am now officially intimidated, but I go ahead and repartition my drive, install Ubuntu and have a bit of a think.
The pain is that with the card offline in Ubuntu I need to keep switching back and forward to Windows in order to research things and spend any time online. I can't get WINE, the Ubuntu windows emulator, because I need to be online to download it and install it. I also don't appear to be terribly good at sorting out documents without links.
So this leads me to a couple of conclusions.
1: I have some learning to do. I reckon that if I can master this it'll be the most challenging thing I have done in ages and if it works I have a lovely Ubuntu partition to play with.
2: The Open Source community is full of really intelligent people. Some of them have brains that are big. I, on the other hand, am a total n00b and the thought bothers me a bit.
3: I should have waited until I was somewhere with an ethernet connection in order to do this. Then wifi wouldn't be an issue.
4: When I go to the UK, I will be buying a laptop and installing Ubuntu, so I either need to get this right now or else sacrifice the wifi capability of said future lappy. And I don't see a point in doing that.
In the end, Ubuntu is going to force me to learn it anyway. It's not like Windows, which does so many things for you that it causes brain atrophy, and it's not as forgiving an environment as Windows, so this isn't going to be easy, but I refuse to be beaten. At some point in the near future there will be a victory post from the Ubuntu partition and I will sing the praises of the software, but between now and then there's going to be a lot of reading.
2 comments:
The hardware situation with Linux is: if your stuff is supported, everything works with Mac OS X levels of "just works" ... if your stuff isn't supported, you're b*gg*r*d.
In the case of Broadcom, they're completely recalcitrant about enabling their stuff in Linux. They actively don't want it working on Linux.
My laptop (an HP Compaq 6710b) has all-Intel chips, so everything works flawlessly. Intel employ a lot of open source developers who make sure things work properly in Linux.
Summary: you still need to be careful about hardware to get a happy Linux experience. Usually it's the manufacturers being lazy, in the case of Broadcom it's actual ill-will.
I have come to the same conclusion, having done further research into Broadcom, and have decided that I will persist, because it's a challenge, but have bitten the bullet and ordered a new card.
Primarily, it's to have a card that's reliable - the wifi here is pretty good, but I seem to be having more and more problems with it under Windows - but also because I want to abandon Windows completely and I can't do that without working out whether I can trust Ubuntu.
However, until it arrives I shall continue to learn. Nothing about this is time wasted.
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