Sloppy's Journal: KC wasted

Ok, I guess I better get the pathetic part of my vacation out of the way, before I start talking about CMF.

Except for Chicago itself (a special case that I'll talk about later), I stayed at fairly good(?) hotels along the way. Not super-expensive 4-star places (which I don't think OKC/STL/KC has anyway) but rather, from a geek point of view, nice places in that they offer more than just a "dataport" for someone to plug their modem line into.

The Westin in downtown OKC and the Marriott in downtown STL give you good ol' fashioned ethernet on a rj45 connector, right there in your room.

I expected the Marriott in downtown KC to be the same. I was wrong. They had high-speed internet, but it was wireless. 802.11b. As it happened, I hadn't gotten around to really testing out Warwick's wireless networking yet. But in KC, I had to, or else go netless.

Mandrake had always detected the hardware fine, but never could really bring the interface up. I always thought that was because I was never around a hotspot. Nope. Here I was in a place I knew was buzzing with 802.11b frames (even if my naked eye couldn't see them) and Mandrake just couldn't get it up.

I had the basics -- I mean, the rawest stage 1 basics, with a few minor things added -- of my Gentoo system installed on another partition, and a kernel for it (I was scared to use the existing Mandrake kernel to run Gentoo; Yog-Sothoth only knows what all is in there!) So I put that kernel onto my /boot partition (I always separate /boot out from my root) added it to grub which Mandrake had already installed for me. Booted it, and now I was actually running Gentoo.

And of course, unlike fucking Mandrake, Gentoo initialized my eth1 just fine. Got an address from some dhcp server, set up /etc/resolv.conf to get names from somewhere, it was like magic. I had a tiny running system, but it had working wireless.

Now here's where I ran into a little problem: the Marriott doesn't really give you free wireless internet. Oh no. This isn't some friendly neighbor providing wireless access to anonymous users. No, all their names resolve to, and all their routes go to, one special little web server, so you can sign up for access using your web browser. Then when they have some money, you are on the internet.

I didn't have a web browser. No Mozilla or even an X display to run it on. I didn't even have telnet. At least, not on my Gentoo environment. Sure, boot up Mandrake and I have more crap than I know about, but then the interface won't work, whether due to the Mandrake version of the kernel or their weird init scripts, I don't know.

Then I got the idea of mounting the Mandrake partition and running their lynx binary. That worked. So I signed up for their ripoff^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvenient internet access, and then I was really on the net and Gentoo could start fetching packages.

The thing is, this all took a while. And once you have xfree built, then you just can't resist getting your favorite window manager (unless you're one of those twm perverts). You know how it is: when a nerd and a computer that he cares about get together, one thing leads to another.

Hey wait ... why did I want to get on the internet in the first place? Well, to email some people. And look up the address of some museum. Oh wait, that museum closed hours ago.

So the sad fact is, I spent too much of my time in Kansas City in my hotel room, playing with my computer and setting it all up the way I wanted it to be -- stuff I had intended to do the weekend before my trip started, but didn't do, because the machine got shipped to me late.

At least I'm fairly happy with the machine, now.

The question now, is which is worse: that I "wasted" my stay in KC, or that Elmegil was right? ;-)

Oklahoma hotels

[dexterpexter]

Oklahoma has one of the finest hotel resorts in the world. We have a Shangri La. It would have been a little out of the way for you, though. But it would have been 45 minutes away from me. :)

Glad to hear you made it where you were going fine. Even if I did stand you up. lol

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Toldya so

[elmegil]

Nah-nah-nah-nah-naah-naaaaah :-)

Seriously, sorry that it was so painful for ya. Having been working with a new VAIO with Atheron wireless, I have *some* empathy, although it really worked pretty easily once I found the madwifi drivers....and recompiled my corporate VPN driver to realize that "ath0" *is* a valid network device.