Geeky Fun: I Sit Again at My Linspire Box.
What a weekend. Lemme see….I tried Underground Desktop, Vector Linux, PCLinuxOS and now I’m back at Linspire.
PCLinuxOS bombed on me at first boot. In keeping with my five requirements (am I beginning to sound like Asimov with his three laws of robotics?), I ditched PCLinuxOS because it failed to recognize my pcmcia wifi card. I don’t mean failed like Vector that noticed it but wouldn’t bring it up, I mean like no-lights-no-nothing failed.
So here I am back at Linspire. It’s slow to boot, yes, but it works and my beloved suspend works. Nothing worse than a laptop that won’t suspend.
As usual when I take these forays through many distros, I’m always thankful that I have my home directory on a totally separate partition. This allows me to change distros like they are ’skins’, leaving my data utterly intact. Even when using my Whoppix Live CD I still have full access to my data.
I did have one scare when one of the distros didn’t mount my home partition at boot. It looked for a few minutes like I had inadvertently formatted my home partition. That was an ugly few minutes, but it reminded me that it’s rather cavalier of me to install new distros and format partitions without having first backed up my data. Bad Jon, BAD!
So the short and the long of it is that despite trying three new distros this weekend, the list of distros that will run on my Dell Inspiron 1000 hasn’t grown any.
Good times!
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5 opinions for Geeky Fun: I Sit Again at My Linspire Box.
John Mills
Jan 29, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Hi there John,
in pclinuxos pcmcia is turned off by default, I think it was a fault that slipped in to the finished version. I really like the distro but I can’t get my wifi card to work with it no matter what. I listen to your show on wifi from TPN but still no luck. Anyway getting the pcmcia to work is no big deal, try this
edit
/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia to read
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=yenta_socket
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=-f
or if that don’t work
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=yenta_socket
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=
It should get PCMCIA working but no promises on the wifi as my card was never detected. Anyway hope this helps, as I said its a great RPM distro to try Jon, just not sure if its up to the Linspire standard ;)
BTW when is JaK attack ep 2 out?
John Mills
Jeff
Jan 29, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Hey Jon,
What kind of connectivity do you have? You seem to be able to download these distros awfully quick judging by the way you’re trying one right after another.
Jon
Jan 30, 2006 at 6:10 am
@John - wow. you know all sorts of things. If I ever put PCLinuxOS on again, I’ll try that :)
JaK Attack! #2 is up now, but there’s some issue with the MP3. The OGG is fine, though.
@Jeff: Normal broadband cable. I wrote these entries over the course of a couple of days, so there was some down time between them :)
Duane
Feb 9, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Jon,
PclinuxOS is an awesome distro, the tip above from John is a must, I think if you do that while running the livecd then it will take effect as soon as you boot up. Definately worth re-testing, I WAS a staunch winFROZE user and would test linux after linux, never being satisfied till I tried pclos. after 2 months of having a dual boot system I freed up some space and g-bye windows along with about 60 gigs of good stuff. It was really no loss :)))
Jon
Feb 10, 2006 at 6:51 am
Thanks Duane.
WinFROZE, eh? I like the name :)
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