Carl Setzer

I've spent the better part of today getting Ubuntu working on an older laptop (Compaq Presario R3000). I installed it several days ago, but was fighting with getting my wifi card to work. 'Twas a bit of challenge due to its agedness. I was trying to get a Broadcom 4301 802.11 b card running with Maverick Meerkat. This is old enough to not be supported, so I needed to get creative. I'm geek-proud of myself for getting it worked out (uninstalled the built in broadcom driver and then utilized the "Windows Wireless Drivers" app & the original driver that shipped with the thing). The more I think about it, the more I'm surprised that I'm only now getting into Linux. Well, I fiddled a bit with it a few years back, but never went anywhere. When I consider my values, my tendency towards "anti-corporate" & anti-commercial and my love of all things geeky, this should've been a slam-dunk. Well, it took a bit, but here I am. We'll see where ...

Well, I’ve seen much of the hoopla around the release of windows newest edition and have been feeling quite underwhelmed. Nothing huge, mind you, just that I haven’t seen anything as yet to induce to buy any of the versions. Comically, I’m still trying to discern the differences between the different versions. What do I get for the $100 version, vs. the $400? I know some of the pieces, but am still not feeling a great, well, anything. With XP, I could tell you what I would get with Home vs. Profession, and why someone should get one or the other. Vista ’s a bit too messy for me, I’m afraid. I’m more excited about installing Ubuntu Linux right now. I just need to budget some time to do a full backup first, then I will partition my Compaq’s hard drive and set it up for dual boot. Hopefully, doing the full install will enable me to troubleshoot my issue with my wi-fi card (running Linux from the cd, I was unable to use my wi-fi card. Oddly, it was detected and on the list of supported d...