Laptops/Notebooks

If any ones else actually reads this blog, sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with school and work. Those of you looking for the media partition install, I'll email you soon.

Though I am now writing because I'll have another laptop to write about. My wife is getting a new iMac to do her design work on, so I'll be getting her old little iBook. Yes the 500Mhz little white iBook.

I'll be trying xubuntu on it, but since that doesn't get updated with the main repos now, i may end up going fully with fedora or yellow dog or a more friendly PPC distro.

If anyone has any suggestions for me, just post a response or email me through the contact me page.

This is the first time I have gotten any version of Linux to hibernate on my laptop. Good ol' Edgy works though, I tested it this afternoon. I just told it to hibernate, it took about the same time as windows to do it. Then when I restarted, it brought up a log in screen like if it was coming back from a screen saver. The boot up took a little less time even. I am really impressed with edgy. Say what you will about the problems, I know I saw my share, but this makes Ubuntu all the more usable on my laptop as the main and, possibly in the future, only OS I need. Try it for yourself, you'll be happy you did.

I am proud to say that VPNC works great. I still have to do a little more configuring to make it so that I no longer have to input all the parameters each time I log in. I am writing from the school library using Ubuntu and VPNC as my connection. For those of you out there who need to use VPN and find Cisco's product troublesome, this is a great solution.

I note that it needs to be run as root to have the proper access. Also you need to know what gateway you are logging on to, the group name and password as well as your own name and password. It does however make those public connections much more secure. I am very happy to use this solution on campus, and no longer rely on windows every time I'm on campus.

I am still trying to find a way to do a good VPN in Ubuntu that works with my schools service. For some reason, I tried to install the Cisco VPN they give us and it didn't work. I had no problems last time so I'm not sure what the difference is this time. I'm trying various open source versions and hopefully will soon be able to confirm the best choice.

Until then have fun in Linux!

This isn’t exactly in order for being a blog, but I have found one thing that could be concerning for other dual-booters out there. If you have a program that mounts your ext3 drive (or probably any Linux format) in windows, if you hibernate windows and then boot into Linux, it can cause some real problems. You need to go into windows and shut down properly first, this will unmount the volume in question. It actually took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but then it dawned on me. If you try to mount a drive that was never unmounted by your other OS, things that you need were never closed properly.