My laptop works
2007-05-31
More or less.
Last week I bought a new laptop: nothing special, just a dirt cheap machine for some low-intensity work. I booted it, used the utility to burn recovery discs (yes, you heard, no media at all with this one: I had to burn my own recovery discs. And for some reason it decided I needed about 5GB worth), put those discs aside (actually disc images saved to another machine), and wiped it.
Although in principle I have plenty of problems with Microsoft, it was almost a shame to see a 'clean' installation of XP go; I've had little trouble with it all told. Go it did though: GNU/Linux awaited, and in any case XP Home isn't allowed on my network1 ;-)
Anyway, installed Debian Etch. That went fine, except that the touchpad didn't work. I started the quest, and to cut a long story short for a week I spent all the time I had for the machine sifting the configuration files, the logs and the web looking for the answer. And last night I found it.
Hack the kernel. Eeek.
It's fine though. Download the source package, open the archive, make the prescribed change (I added 11 bytes of executable code to one file, plus a chunky comment for good measure), compile, wonder why the package isn't there, wonder why recompiling doesn't work, notice that the website I'm working from has changed '--' to '–', recompile then install the new kernel package.
Next is to get the wireless LAN to work, but I might not bother until I actually have a need for it. For the foreseeable future while I need to trail a mains cable across the room I may as well do it with a network cable too.
1Not because I'm using any of the things that Home is missing2: it's just because I'm a snob like that.
2To be fair, I was at one stage running things on my network that required Professional. Even now I need at least one Pro machine.
I wonder if I can find/write an auto-footnote gadget for this CMS.
Last week I bought a new laptop: nothing special, just a dirt cheap machine for some low-intensity work. I booted it, used the utility to burn recovery discs (yes, you heard, no media at all with this one: I had to burn my own recovery discs. And for some reason it decided I needed about 5GB worth), put those discs aside (actually disc images saved to another machine), and wiped it.
Although in principle I have plenty of problems with Microsoft, it was almost a shame to see a 'clean' installation of XP go; I've had little trouble with it all told. Go it did though: GNU/Linux awaited, and in any case XP Home isn't allowed on my network1 ;-)
Anyway, installed Debian Etch. That went fine, except that the touchpad didn't work. I started the quest, and to cut a long story short for a week I spent all the time I had for the machine sifting the configuration files, the logs and the web looking for the answer. And last night I found it.
Hack the kernel. Eeek.
It's fine though. Download the source package, open the archive, make the prescribed change (I added 11 bytes of executable code to one file, plus a chunky comment for good measure), compile, wonder why the package isn't there, wonder why recompiling doesn't work, notice that the website I'm working from has changed '--' to '–', recompile then install the new kernel package.
Next is to get the wireless LAN to work, but I might not bother until I actually have a need for it. For the foreseeable future while I need to trail a mains cable across the room I may as well do it with a network cable too.
1Not because I'm using any of the things that Home is missing2: it's just because I'm a snob like that.
2To be fair, I was at one stage running things on my network that required Professional. Even now I need at least one Pro machine.
I wonder if I can find/write an auto-footnote gadget for this CMS.
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