Wireless networks and Linux…

They don’t appear to mix. I’ve spent 4 days now trying to get the Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN mini-card in a Dell Latitude D531 to work on Mandriva Linux 2008.0 I’ve been following one how-to but I keep hitting the same dead end of an error message. I can see why some critics say Linux just isn’t ready for consumers…

This is the how-to I’ve been following.

EDIT: I see this has been drawing a few users. If you have Mandriva, the following will tell you how to get it working:

Hello Mandriva!

Well I finally did it. I partitioned a laptop’s hard-drive and made a dual boot of Mandriva Linux and WinXP. The first time I got a laptop with a bad hard-drive, 3 others got rejected, I got it on then screwed up KDE, and now it’s on, setup and running smoothly

Just wanted to post that.

Oh boy! Four day weekend and a cold to go with it…

OK, good news first. I got a four day weekend! I was off Friday already and have Monday off as well. We also didn’t get another huge ice storm for Valentines Day this year. Thank god; that one last year was a living hell - no power for about 3 days and temps under freezing.

So now the bad news… I’ve got a terrible cold for a week now. It’s getting better but I’m still not back to normal. So it’s ruined what I was hopping to do this weekend; hang out with one of my friends and maybe have a sleep-over for the first time in months.

In other news, for one of my computer classes in school I borrowed a laptop for the weekend on which I was going to partition the hard-drive and then install Linux on it to figure out how to work with Linux. Turns out the laptop is way overdue for repairs; the hard drive is starting to fail and needs to be replaced asap because it’s got endless bad clusters (physical damage) and the battery no longer charges so it has to be plugged in all the time.

Well at least I got an extended weekend so I’ll call things even.