jallison's Journal: Linux move

I decided to go ahead with the move to Linux on my laptop. I have kept a Windows partition rather than going whole hog, which turned out to be a Good Decision. I went with Mandrake 10.1 because I've heard that it's a pretty friendly distro, and part of this experiment is to see if getting off of Windows is really doable for someone who doesn't want to make their computer their hobby.

I downloaded the distribution and burned CD's using "BurnCDCC". This is likely the first stumbling block for a potential new user. They may know how to burn CD's, but they don't know how to burn an ISO image onto a CD. Explorer doesn't know how to do it either, so you need a third party app. They're not hard to find, but newbies will likely want to order CD's.

My CD's burned fine and I was able to boot from CD 1. I needed to shrink my Windows partition, which the Mandrake distro lets you do. It's really nice that a partition manager is included here. Partition Magic works fine, but who wants to pay $40 for something you use once or twice? I got a little scared when the partition manager failed the first time. I had already done a defrag and error check, so I don't know what the problem was. It worked the second time, but getting odd errors from partition managers is not fun.

The install went OK, and the system seemed to detect my gear, from display characteristics to USB mouse to Ethernet adapter (but not wireless, more on that later). I was able to boot up and get into the KDE environment. But here I hit a snag. I noticed that the system was getting hot and the fan was on full bore. I ran top and saw that there was a kedit process taking as much CPU as it could get, and it never seemed to go away. I nuked it and got a disturbing error message about mounted filesystems. Mostly by luck I determined that if I booted up wihtout my USB key drive in place, this symptom did not occur. I posted a note on the mandrakeexpert site, but nobody has even looked at it in four days, let alone offered an answer.

I then got down to migrating some apps and documents over. One big conern I had was how to share mail between Windows and Linux. I was afraid that I'd have to have a flag day where I quit accepting mail into my Windows Thunderbird mailbox and started accepting it on Linux. But I found a nice article that describes how to share your mailbox between Linux and Windows. One problem: it requires a FAT partition since Linux can't write to NTFS partitions. So that meant getting back into the partition manager, shrinking down a partition and creating a small (4GB) partition just for mail. I did that, and it went OK. I now can read mail from Linux or Windows and it's consistent, which is great.

Over the weekend I decided to tackle the wireless issue. I did a bit of resarch and learned that the wireless card that is embedded in my laptop (a Broadband card) is not natively supported on Linux. You need to build ndiswrapper and configure it. OK, I'm game. I download ndiswrapper sources, but they won't build because I'm missing kernel sources that contain defs that they need. OK, one step back, let's get into the configuration manager in KDE and load up kernel sources. Bzzzzzt. When I try to install that package, KDE tells me that it can't install. No reason why, nothing. So now I'm stuck. I don't know if I'm missing something, doing something wrong, or what. And there doesn't seem to be a very vibrant community to ask. Or at least I haven't found it yet.

In summary, I'm not overly disappointed. I've got a dual boot laptop. I can access my documents, and equally important, my mail, from both sides. Open Office is installed, so I can read Word and Excel docs, which is important. On the down side, I have no wirelss support, which is a must in a laptop. I also cannot get my USB key drive working, which is a drag, as it's a very handy device.

What next? I'll pound on getting the kernel sources installed so I can fix the wireless problem. Then I'll look into the USB issue. At that point I'll be ready to see if this is a truly useful configuration for me.

USB memory stick

[nizo]

You might try adding the following line to your /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/memstick vfat noauto,user 0 0

Make sure the /mnt/memstick directory exists (if not create it). Note you will need to do the above as root.

Now you should be able to insert the memstick and
type:

mount /mnt/memstick

and the stick will be available in /mnt/memstick. Make sure to type:

umount /mnt/memstick

before removing it. As far as the wireless goes, I have not had problems with a few different cards, but I always made sur

Re:USB memory stick

[jallison]

Thanks for the info. You got me looking into this and it turns out that there's already a /removable directory under /mnt. If I insert the drive after the system is up, it mounts in that directory and is accessible. There still is a problem if the system boots with the drive in place (it pegs at 100% CPU), but I'll just avoid that.