New Linux User

Geeky Fun: Underground Desktop, Whoppix, and Vector Linux

by Jon on January 27th, 2006

Here I sit at 9pm local time typing this entry in Firefox on my live Whoppix CD. Why my live Whoppix CD, you ask? Well, Underground Desktop didn’t go that well for me.

I have to admit that it installed very easily. I had to do some rudimentary configuration to indicate which partitions I wanted UD to use for swap and root, type in a root user name, and off it went.

The only really wonky thing about it was that my system wouldn’t shut down after the reboot, or after a normal shutdown. The screeen would go blank, but then the system would hang. Not good.

Then the networking thing reared its ugly head. I have a set of requirements that a distro must meet either out of the box, or shortly after installation. The requirement is that the following elements function:

• keyboard
• mouse
• video
• sound
• networking

As long as those 5 bits are working (or I can get them working pretty quick) then my system is functioning enough that I can carry on and learn the rest of the bits. UD failed on the networking part.

I run a wireless card in my laptop. When I first switched to GNU/Linux in the summer-ish of 2004, wifi card support was pretty spotty and I had to jump throught a lot of hoops to get it working. Times have changed, however, and I can’t remember the last distro I tried that didn’t pick up my wireless card right out of the box.

That’s not what I’m bitching about, however. I’m perfectly happy to use NDISwrapper to get my wifi card up and running and then bring ifconfig and iwconfig to bear to configure the thing and bring it up. Problem is, Underground Desktop doesn’t come with NDISWrapper.

Dudes, this is critical. How is a guy supposed to do anything if he can’t access the network? There’s no way to look for help and no way to download applications or modules that may help. You’ve got to give users a backdoor to get their network up if the distro’s hardware detection fails. I felt like that time I tried a distro (can’t remember the name now) that didn’t come with the tool chain (gcc and make). Without those two tools I was unable to recompile my kernel to put the modules in that I needed to get my network card up and running. Totally. Stranded.

So now I sit here in Whoppix (currently WHAX) downloading Vector Linux. As usual, when my new exciting distro craps out on me, I take it as an opportunity to try something else new and I’ve been wanting to try Vector Linux for awhile.

Stay tuned for the Vector Linux episode…

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