StarDestroyer.Net BBS

After much mucking around, I finally got Linux working on my laptop. My main issue was that my WLAN card refused to work and when it actually decided to get recognized it'd bring down the system along with it. So I went one on long journey trying to see WTF was wrong, including switching between different distributions.

The first thing I tried was Mandrake 9.0; nice and simple to use, but felt rather sluggish on my machine.

I then used SuSE, which ran faster, but was (IMHO) more cluttered and more difficult to use. I did prefer YAST over Mandrake's package manager. OTOH, the lack of downloadable ISOs was annoying if understandable.

Finally, I switched to Red Hat. The ability to download it off my school's LAN (w00t! 8MB/sec!) was a plus. And I think that I like this distribution best. Their "bluecurve" forced-hybridization between GNOME and KDE cleans things up, and hell, it just works. The difficulty curve is somewhere between SuSE and Mandrake. It isn't perfect, but I find it's experience better (and default-enabled xft support is good). There are some odd (IMHO) RedHat ways of doing things, but I'm learning them.

Back to the WLAN thing. Still no go; same damned error messages. So I hit up LinuxQuestions and hoped that someone got something similar...and someone did. And it was something I swore that I did earlier, which was to flash the firmware to the latest version.

After grabbing my mom's laptop (runs Windows, and I know that the driver for Windows doesn't care what firmware you use, unlike the pickier Linux version) and flashing the card, I put it into my own laptop. Bam! The lights flicker on, iwconfig finds the SSID and everything's happy.

Now, if only OpenOffice weren't so sucky...or maybe it's just me? I've used Microsoft Office for at least ten years now (First on Windows 3.1 and MacOS 7.0; with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel on MacOS 6.7.1)

phongn wrote:Now, if only OpenOffice weren't so sucky...or maybe it's just me? I've used Microsoft Office for at least ten years now (First on Windows 3.1 and MacOS 7.0; with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel on MacOS 6.7.1)

OpenOffice does take some getting used to; StarOffice 5.1 happened to be the first full office suite that I got, so I happen to be very used to it.

OpenOffice doesn't have grammer check, though StarOffice 6.0 does, which is understandable, since they are trying to get you to buy the latter.

Crayz9000 wrote:

phongn wrote:Now, if only OpenOffice weren't so sucky...or maybe it's just me? I've used Microsoft Office for at least ten years now (First on Windows 3.1 and MacOS 7.0; with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel on MacOS 6.7.1)

OpenOffice does take some getting used to; StarOffice 5.1 happened to be the first full office suite that I got, so I happen to be very used to it.

I'm just used to all the keybindings, menu and toolbar locations, etc. OO also lacks (greatly) the polish that MSO has.

phongn wrote:I'm just used to all the keybindings, menu and toolbar locations, etc. OO also lacks (greatly) the polish that MSO has.

Well, on the bright side, OOo is extremely easy when it comes to configuring keybindings. Just go to Tools>Configure, then click the Keybindings tab... while Word makes you jump through hoops to do the same thing.

I feel your pain. I bought SuSE 8.1, and everything works fine, but I can't get online.

Heh... I just installed Mandrake 8.2 because of the stupid Adaptec firmware revision (which means I can't run anything newer) and I'm now upgrading KDE and the other apps...

Although I've been told that I should be able to compile the old Adaptec aic7xxx driver on my father's Mandrake 9 machine...

Crayz9000 wrote:Although I've been told that I should be able to compile the old Adaptec aic7xxx driver on my father's Mandrake 9 machine...

Okay ........ that made no sense to me.

jegs2 wrote:I feel your pain. I bought SuSE 8.1, and everything works fine, but I can't get online.

Lets try to resolve this, shall we?

How do you access the internet? LAN? Cable?

jegs2 wrote:

Crayz9000 wrote:Although I've been told that I should be able to compile the old Adaptec aic7xxx driver on my father's Mandrake 9 machine...

Okay ........ that made no sense to me.

Okay, he apparently has some sort of SCSI card that uses an AIC7___ - series chip on it. He's having driver issues, and has to compile (convert from source code to executable binary code) the old driver on his father's Linux installation.

i have mandrake 8 on two of my machines and have never had any issues with them. hell, my older machine was faster then a new one when comparing mandrake 8 to win xp. i just couldnt get USB shit to work but then i never tried.

I have Mandrake 8.2 on my laptop ( Thinkpad 600E ) and cant access the net either. Evidently there is no driver for the onboard modem, I have not tried to find one for the wireless Netgear card. Im sure there are Xircom drivers but the damn Xircom 10/100 card broke.

phongn wrote:Okay, he apparently has some sort of SCSI card that uses an AIC7___ - series chip on it. He's having driver issues, and has to compile (convert from source code to executable binary code) the old driver on his father's Linux installation.

That basically sums it up.

Adaptec recently updated the firmware for their SCSI cards, including the AIC7xxx series. Along with these updates came new Linux drivers, which unfortunately won't work with the old firmware. Note that this applies to all recently revised Linux distros, and not just Mandrake.

It would be really nice if I could simply flash the SCSI card, but Adaptec will not let you do that... so I have several choices:
1) Forget about Linux
2) Compile the old driver on my father's Mandrake 9 machine and import it during install, which is not guaranteed to work
3) Use Mandrake 8.2

I might do option two, but right now I'd just like to be able to use Linux, so 8.2 it is. (I had it installed before, anyway...)

phongn wrote:

jegs2 wrote:I feel your pain. I bought SuSE 8.1, and everything works fine, but I can't get online.

Lets try to resolve this, shall we?

How do you access the internet? LAN? Cable?

Sorry, been on my TS2068 for the last couple of hours (got a LarKen FDD -- rare as hen's teeth -- off ebay and have been playing with it), so I'm back. Well, I use a LAN card, hooked to a DSL line.

Hybrid LFS/CoreLinux/Redhat 7.1 here (basically corelinux is the basic GNU utilities, LFS is compiled on top of that (this part not done yet, so compatibility problems from missing some components) , plus some RPMs stolen and converted from RH 7.1).

My linux machine's hardware is shitty though- P120MMX, 1GB harddrive, 48MB RAM. Won't run Mozilla, barely runs Phoenix, Skipstone and the other lightweight browsers are shitty (Skipstone's doesn't use it's cache correctly, while other browsers don't support CSS). Can Opera run on this kind of hardware?

Precompiled Mozilla with XFT (RedHat 8 RPMs) here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/relea ... x_RPMS/xft

Personally, I hate AA, since it makes fonts look smeared, and my shitty computer here would take a performance hit.

Freetype has hinting, but it sucks without having to recompile and violate a few patents from Apple. I'm not sure if RedHat already has it compiled with this on, though in that case they turned it on. Damn software patents to hell. Looking at one of the patents, it seems to be pretty obvious...
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html

Pu-239 wrote:
Precompiled Mozilla with XFT (RedHat 8 RPMs) here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/relea ... x_RPMS/xft

Pu right now I could kiss you that looks to be exactly what I needed.

Linux isn't worth the money. Go with Win2000. Much less hassle and
aggravation, and a much smarter install program (if the install program
fucks up while copying a file, it goes back and recopies the file until it
gets it right, unlike Mandrake's install, which lets the corrupt file sit and
moves onto other files)

jegs2 wrote:

phongn wrote:

jegs2 wrote:I feel your pain. I bought SuSE 8.1, and everything works fine, but I can't get online.

Lets try to resolve this, shall we?

How do you access the internet? LAN? Cable?

Sorry, been on my TS2068 for the last couple of hours (got a LarKen FDD -- rare as hen's teeth -- off ebay and have been playing with it), so I'm back. Well, I use a LAN card, hooked to a DSL line.

Hrm, did you connect the same machine previously to the Internet or was it anoyher one?

Open the terminal and type /sbin/ifconfig and copy-paste the results.

MKSheppard wrote:Linux isn't worth the money. Go with Win2000. Much less hassle and
aggravation, and a much smarter install program (if the install program
fucks up while copying a file, it goes back and recopies the file until it
gets it right, unlike Mandrake's install, which lets the corrupt file sit and
moves onto other files)

Odd, I haven't had issues with corrupt install files on either Mandrake 9, SuSE 8.1 or RedHat 8.

I've found RH8 to be about as complex as Windows 2000, YMMV.

Xfree86 4.3 is out. I'm too lazy to upgrade though, even though it has better font handling.

MKSheppard wrote:Linux isn't worth the money. Go with Win2000. Much less hassle and
aggravation, and a much smarter install program (if the install program
fucks up while copying a file, it goes back and recopies the file until it
gets it right, unlike Mandrake's install, which lets the corrupt file sit and
moves onto other files)

Shut up, Clinton.

Linux isn't worth the money.

You're right. Good thing its free.

Pu-239 wrote:My linux machine's hardware is shitty though- P120MMX, 1GB harddrive, 48MB RAM. Won't run Mozilla, barely runs Phoenix, Skipstone and the other lightweight browsers are shitty (Skipstone's doesn't use it's cache correctly, while other browsers don't support CSS). Can Opera run on this kind of hardware?

Yup, Opera 6.0 runs just fine on my P133, but it gets bogged down pretty bad when I hit a page with loads of javascripts and animations, and graphics heavy pages will slow it down a tad too. Browsing SD.net with that machine is a bit slower than with my main computer especially when going through the picture heavy threads in the Artworks forum, but other than that it's fine.

phongn wrote:Hrm, did you connect the same machine previously to the Internet or was it anoyher one?

Same DSL hookup I use for this desktop on which I'm communicating. I pull out the DSL line and hook it to the LAN card on my Sony Viao notebook computer.

Open the terminal and type /sbin/ifconfig and copy-paste the results.

Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1956 (1.9 kb) TX bytes:1956 (1.9 Kb)

That's rather unusual...Linux doesn't even seem to be seeing your network card. Just the loopback adapter...

Hrm, dammit, I don't have SuSE installed anymore, so I don't know how to configure it's networking. Try this, though, maybe something's weird:
and see if it at least recognizes the network card.