A newbie's progress almost completed

It's been a while since my last report, and with various and sundry other issues going on, it wasn't until recently that I've been able to continue with my project. On the other hand, it's almost complete.

For those who didn't read my earlier stuff, I have an IBM ThinkPad 1200i series, and I had it set up with Windows XP. It's mostly been relegated to providing music to our family stereo, via Internet radio and by the MP3 files we've burned onto a portable hard drive. I was looking at various ways to use Linux to duplicate what we were doing using XP. I was focusing on lightweight live CD's at the time, and had tried Ubuntu, Slax, and Damn Small Linux.

About a week after I wrote last about this, I had a brainstorm. There was a small shop nearby that sold used PC and laptop parts. My laptop had 32 MB permanently installed, and an additional 64 MB on a chip. I found out that for about $29 I could get a 128 MB chip. I also found that for $15, I could buy an additional 6.5 GB hard drive for the laptop to replace the one that had Windows XP already installed. In one of what I must admit to have been my brighter moments, I grabbed both, reasoning that if this whole thing fell flat, I at least had a fall-back position.

They formatted the drive for me, I installed it and the memory, things ran a lot more quickly than they had... and I started wondering if I really needed to run from a live CD after all.

One bit of reasoning led to another, and I blew the dust off my copy of Ubuntu 5.04. I started installing, the laptop hummed along... and suddenly said that it couldn't read the CD. After about 5 seconds of cursing, I calmed down. Maybe the CD was bad.

Three different CD's later showed that to be a vain hope. The CD-ROM was apparently getting cranky in its old age. The shop didn't have any spare ones available, and I also wasn't certain whether it might have been a fault of the CD-RW I had used before.

After a short interlude of research and reminding my children and wife that I was actually taller than them, I started thinking about Debian's approach, where a minimal CD would allow access to the Internet so that the remainder of the packages could be downloaded and installed. I started working with that idea, only to have it get shot down in flames when the minimal install CD didn't recognize the USB-based network card.

I looked at installing Damn Small Linux. It worked very nicely... until I started trying to compile the driver for the USB ZYDas wireless connector, and found that I had to downloading various packages until I got hold of everything.

That was when I learned that Ubuntu's expert install could let the computer download and install. I decided that, since I had the 5.04 CD's that Ubuntu had actually burnt and sent to me, I'd stay with that. After a lot of research, a lot more cussing, and a goodly amount of coffee for mental lubrication, I finally got the "Hoary Hedgehog" installed on the laptop.

I'd fixed the portable hard drive by the last report, and Ubuntu picked it up without a hitch.

can let me get a TTY to log in as root, and put a user in as a valid member for the sudo group.

After even more cussing, I figured out how to keep the USB wireless card from hanging the system (I found the article where someone altered the order that hotplug checked items, and implemented it).

I tried ndiswrapper to connect to the USB wireless dongle. It would almost work... it recognized the device, it just wouldn't do anything with it.

Finally, I got hold of the driver for the device, and through some arduous tasks finally extracted enough pieces and parts to let me compile the driver.

The laptop now recognizes the device. It also created a wlan0 entry (as opposed to the sit0 entry before), and I just need to fine tune the configuration on it.

Finally, I added the software that lets Ubuntu run MP3 files. No cussing was required for that part.

Tonight, I plan on having this done, and hope to have it back, connected to the stereo, available for limited browsing (weather reports, usually) and Internet radio

I don't know if this wins me my spurs and elevates me from the level of newbie - there's still a lot I don't know how to do yet to put this laptop up to the full functionality it had under XP, and I'm also pretty sure that I've got a lot more on the system that I really needed.

Still, I feel some pride in actually managing to look for, find, and apply technical information from various sources. I have told people that Linux has a much more forgiving atbreastude about "obsolete" equipment than anything coming out of Redmond, and I am happy to be able to point to this as an example of this.

John Gardner