February 11, 2009

GNOME Network Manager STILL 100% FAIL

Almost a year ago I wrote about WICD for the first time. Mostly out of frustration for how badly Network Manager SUCKED. Well, nine months later I'm writing about WICD again, and again its due to Network Manager FAIL. My office uses an WPA+TKIP access point... this is pretty standard stuff... but Network Manager COULD NOT ASSOCIATE ME TO THE AP!!!! O-M-F-G!? So long as that hunk of shit is the default network manager in Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc., Linux will not gain widespread acceptance. WICD FTW!!!!!!!!!!

February 09, 2009

A trip to the library...

Amanda (The Queen) shared with me an interesting statistic she had read: that homeschoolers are responsible for approximately 40% of the books checked-out from libraries. HOLY CRAP! 40% I didn't believe her...until today, when we went to the library.

The boys are studying medieval times in school along with the military lessons I've been working with them on (to my shame, I've been doing a poor job of that!) SO, Amanda located the correct section at the library and, as near as I can tell, checked-out every book on the subject.

I kid you not, we must've checked out just shy of 50 books today. Its staggering. Those kids will know about the medieval times! If not through simple osmoses...

February 07, 2009

So long Vista, and thanks for all the...fish?

I installed Vista Enterprise about four months ago in an attempt to familiarize myself with it for work... though no one intentionally sends me out to do Windows support anymore, it does happen on occasion. As such, I felt I needed to be familiar enough with Vista to actually support it. That said, the last four months have been a living hell. Between the `explorer.exe` hangs, hideous performance, and learning-curve, I've come to loath Vista even more than most. SO, last night I installed Linux Mint 6. Oh the joy.

This install was on my HP Compaq nx9420, which I've had for a couple of years. Its a great box and has served me very well. Unfortunately, the nx9420 still isn't an install and go platform. There are issues you have to address that I've documented in the Ubuntu Wiki page for the nx9420. The most glaring issue is, of course, that suspend to ram doesn't work out of the box. From a support perspective, everything else seems to be dandy, you just can't suspend.

Unfortunately, Stephan Graber has changed his website and as a result there is a broken link in my wiki entry for his hp-s2ram.patch. SO, I had to do a fair bit of digging to find it. :-\ I have found it, and it can be downloaded here, as well as a mirror I've put up on my site, here.

Other than having to fix suspend, everything seems to work dandy. Any other nx9420 owners out there that would like to contribute their tips are free to contact me at coreyjsteele_a.t_gmail.com.