I went to the SJSU Linux Club’s installfest on Saturday. The results weren’t so great. I had to wipe my entire hard drive to get everything working right again. I have a backup of my hard drive sitting back in Winters so I didn’t lose any data, but my installation of Windows/Office/Visual Studio is gone. That stuff takes a while to reinstall so its not good. The good news is that I eventually got Linux working. I have a Fedora disk and an Ubuntu disk. I thought I might be better off with the Fedora disk but then I realized that with Ubuntu my wireless setup would work out of the box. That’s important because wireless internet is my main means of delivery these days and I can’t do anything without it. For instance in order to figure out how to get wireless working on linux I needed the internet which was a bit of catch 22 for me. So I was impressed by the builtin wireless support in Ubuntu. I also have gotten my Verizon EVDO PC5740 card working which is also very important for me. It wasn’t all that straight forward, but also not to difficult for a computer scientist to figure out thanks to a howto by Ken Kinder. For anyone who tries using the howto, it hasn’t been updated for Ubuntu 6, so it wont work unless you make the modification discussed in the comment by mark s on 2006-03-27.
Tags: SJSU LUG
