I have a USB stick, Kingston Datatraveler 4GB. I've had it since November. It was never used that much. It has now become "read-only", unwriteable when mounted. There's no hardware toggle to have caused this. This seems a not-uncommon problem, online. Kingston fail.

This one's mostly for the search engines.

My Insight/Comcast cablemodem has not been all that reliable, with various random outages and promises to send a technician a week later (though to be fair, the outages mysterious stop, also at the source, despite what the tech support said on the phone.) I got fed up and ordered ATT DSL... a month ago, and finally got around to activating it. This is a bit non-trivial, especially with Linux instead of Windows or a Mac; phone tech support said they wouldn't support it. And I don't even have their software to run under Wine, probably because I already had a modem and said so, and they never sent me a kit.

Inputs: one Ubuntu laptops, one 2Wire modem+wireless route from AT&T 1.5 years ago.
Preliminary Procedure:
1. Plug in modem. Observe flashing red "DSL" light.
2. Call tech support. Spend 40 minutes, much of it on hold in stages. Eventually get a diagnosis that my line had problems, with someone sent out the next day; also get an IP address for the modem.
3. Have technician come fix the line; modem is now green. Technician gives further instructions, not being fazed by Linux.

Actual procedure:
Using Firefox, go to https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net
Try getting past the initial registration page; fail, because the Next button doesn't work. Per Internet rumor, download Konqueror and try again.

1. Using Konqueror, go to https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net
2. Try registering with e-mail address printed on my bill; give up, and go with option 2, using the High Speed Internet (HSI) number on my bill (I don't have phone with AT&T.)
3. Go through fairly intuitive pages.
4. Worry as, once I seem to be almost done, the next button stops working.
5. Optimistically, go to 192.168.1.254 (note: different IP than my cablemodem uses.) Futz around the menus, in particular setting the AT&T/Yahoo username and password I'd created on the SBC page. Also the wireless name and mode and password. In the process use the System Key in brackets on a label on the modem. This may have been complicated by my modem having been used before.
6. Profit! Both my computers are on the net.

I don't know if that was perfectly helpful, but it should at least confirm it's possible, with one example of website and IP address. Oh, and this is in Indiana.

So, I run Ubuntu on this here laptop. I'd been holding off on the big upgrade to Hardy Heron, but I finally started it last night. It's mostly done now. There were Problems.

* Some language localization thing, localedef, spun forever until killed, and generally messed things up. This seems common or universal, at least for those of us who went with a kernel update from the previous version in the past week. I don't know if things are fully settled now; for a while zsh was segfaulting and init wasn't taking kill commands. Oh,and localedef hadn't been responding to kill -9, only killall, and eventually not even that. Nothing is supposed to be immune to kill -9 in Unix. Bad, very bad.

* Wireless didn't work, per normal for the Compaq Presario C500, barring user intervention. This actually saw an improvement: this time I was asked for permission to go download a driver, then the wireless worked.

* Sound: this had problems in the past too, with headphones not muting the main speakers without black magic intervention. That problem didn't come back. Instead there was a new problem: massive distortion. This is commonly reported, and fixed by turning the volume down and up in software. I have no idea why that works. The volume then was too soft even at mix, but more software fixed that. The final problem is that the volume control buttons on the laptop hardware no longer work.

* The upgrade included moving to Firefox 3, which has shrunk the size of the toolbar buttons -- okay, at least there's more screen available -- done something to the fonts, so now my serif font looks too small and if I fix that, the sans font looks too big (ok, I don't know if that's Firefox or Ubuntu messing up the fonts), and the address bar is now the "Awesome bar" (no, really, that's what the developers call it.) If you type into it, it does a keyword search in your history and bookmarks, presenting a weirdly ordered list which takes up 5x the screen space of the old one, and returns fewer results to boot. Lots of people seem to love this. Other people like me, who were used to our typing serving as a prefix to what we wanted, don't like the change. There's a very obscure toggle to somewhat restore the old functionality; to get the old appearance you need one plug-in, which ignored me, or another plug-in, which is "experimental" so you have to log into mozilla to get it. From what little I've read the devteam decided to make a UI change and wants to force it on everyone, thus the minimal configurability. Also the "show all history" is now a separate window (minor) and lacks some of the sorting options, such as "by site and date". Finally, some pages don't render well -- my own LJ friends page has the text 'buttons' running right up against each other, and another page has text landing right on top of other text.

Offsetting that is the fact that Page Info is more informative, and has controls for cookies and images and such for that page. But I'm still thinking of going back to Firefox 2. Of course that had stability problems when closing tabs with Flash in them.

Once again, I suffer from the quixotic temptation to WRITE EVERYTHING MYSELF starting with an uncrashable kernel.

I finally finished watching Planetes last night. It's a hard science fiction anime: 2075, Earth orbit, a team of people picking up debris. It took me a long time to get past the first 4 episodes, but I don't know if that was their quality or my enervated mood at the time; past few days saw me go from 5 to 26. Good mechanics, silence in space. Not perfect: given all the debris tracking, criminals shouldn't be able to even think about getting away, but that was just one minor plot, and to be fair they did use the words "active stealthing" even if they didn't justify them.

( the rest )

So, I use Ununtu on this laptop. I had most things working. Then it wanted to upgrade itself to Gutsy. Okay...

I followed recommendations and wireless stopped working. I was able to undo that, though.

Password prompt no long comes up when I close and open the laptop lid.

And the biggie... the default media program no longer played WMA or AVI files. For comparison,when I installed Feisty, the program said "I can't run these... would you like me to get the software to run them?" So they've managed to degrade performance. I've installed all recommendations I can find, and can actually play video with a couple of other programs -- unfortunately, their interfaces are inferior, and I'd like my old one. Help has not sprung forth, yet.

Also I note the font I'm seeing in this text entry box is different.

Hadware: Compaq Presario C500, 1.5 G Ram, $400, 1.6 GHz Centrino

So, I got this thing... last Sunday. Didn't really start in on it till Tuesday. Been playing with it since.
As noted earlier, it came with Vista, which took 40% of the RAM and chewed the hard drive. I tested that stuff such as wireless worked, then moved on. FreeBSD got a try -- a couple of tries, since the first one crashed -- but didn't recognize key laptop bits like the lid, and I didn't want to mess around. PC-BSD, a user friendly version, also didn't work until the second, the first simply failing to install /usr and /var -- and had problems with sound. Ubuntu mostly just worked, though I had to perform occult spells to get wireless working, and have to perform another one to get the speakers to turn off if headphones are plugged in.

(IU VPN wireless will need its own incantations, but that's not the laptop's fault. Ubuntu, or IU IT whose instructions don't work.)

Other stuff really just does work. Battery monitor, sound, lid closing doing something. But there's been weird behavior, the cursor jumping around and such. At first I thought I was hitting the touchpad, but that doesn't actually do much. Then I discovered a menu key on the keyboard, which explains some things, though I'm not always sure I'm touching it when the menu pops up. After some really weird behavior in vi I tracked down the big culprit: a special part of the touchpad. There are orange lines along the right and bottom. Pad space beneath the bottom isn't special, but pad space to the right of that line acts as a scroll bar. Which is actually pretty useful, now that I know about it, but brushing *it* with my thumb causes a lot of problems.
This version of Ubuntu/GNOME (Feisty Fawn) seems to have known problems with unmounting external hard drives from the desktop.

I've also played with desktops: default GNOME, KDE, compiz, xfce. GNOME's pretty good, and in response to AVI files said "I don't have the codecs for this, would you like me to get them?" which worked. GNOME takes half the memory of Visa. xfce has some nice transparency aesthetics and seems very configurable but played AVIs without video. KDE is also configurable, doesn't have much else visibly going for it, and just refused to play my AVIs. compiz is a window manager which can supposedly do neat effects, like putting workspaces on the walls of a cube or room, which you can rotate, but the configuration looks like a nightmare without some extra software I didn't feel like exploring.

There are quirks. Firefox managed to obscure the desktop panels once before, and has done so again while I was typing. Not replicated yet. totem, GNOME's AVI player, I discovered was rather washed out. I found settings which fixed the whiteout -- oddly I had turn down contrast, not just brightness, and the tradeoff between "visible" and "dark" seems fine to non-existent, especially depending on the input anime. I installed mplayer and will test it, but will post this first before I lose all the test.

Update: no difference. Guess totem changes hardware settings (but doesn't affect the desktop appearance), else they read the same configuration file.

Other laptop thing: it feels that I'm exploring exciting new unergonomic positions. Instead of being hunched over my too high (but large and cheap) desk, I sit on my couch and feel an extra 6 pounds on my tailbone.

Other news: Le Petit Cafe is now up to $10.95 for the price fixe Sunday brunch, and $1.95 for tea or coffee. I'm still not sure if you're supposed to tip at a place where you're served by the owners. Bloomingfood's West has Honeycrisp apples.

The panel hiding problem seems connected to F11 in Firefox. Though if I hit F10 or F12 that stops working for a bit. Tres weird.

Installation happened without any freezes or failures. Sound was picked up. Contrary to expectation, it seems to have found the Wireless device as well, though the wireless has not yet managed to hook up to the network. (Vista could, so I know the laptop is capable of it.) Ubuntu's GNOME seems well designed, too; Windowsish, lots of easy to find administrative options. Though a sour note: each one seems to be its own program, and after closing one option you have to go back to the menu to get the next one.

By default, you have to enter your password at bootup. Or even at waking up after sleeping. Oh yeah -- it picked up the battery, and goes to sleep when I close the lid. And the sound buttons work. And I just plugged in my external USB hard drive, and that opened up in the file manager automatically. *Win*

Of course, I'm in GNOME, and I'd like to play with other window managers. But hopefully FreeBSD can cope with my mother's desktop, and I can try Enlightenment there. Though I suppose I should think about keeping XP on it, just for network setup ease.

Actually, Windows isn't driving my monitor at more than 1152x864 (could do higher, but I'd lose color or refresh rate; I hate flicker.)

But FreeBSD had frozen once during installation, then crashed again when I tried to sleep it. I decided to try friendlier installation routes. There are wrappers for FreeBSD, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. Desktop wouldn't download quickly, and then the website wouldn't respond. PC-BSD came okay, but failed to make /usr or /var as far as I can tell. I gave it a second try (yay, ghost bugs) and that time it did install. Maybe the CD was jilted at the wrong point the first time around? But it didn't recognize sound or wireless.

Next stop: Ubuntu. To be fair, apparently Ubuntu needs to be told how to handle wireless as well. OTOH, I actually have instructions for that.

It has FreeBSD, and X Windows.

And a 1200x800 screen, which now feels rather cramped.
And a hyper-sensitive touchpad when I'm typing.