I haven’t touched this distribution in at least a year but someone asked me to look at one earlier today. The symptom – “it wont connect to the Internet – there’s not even an icon in the system tray”.
Linpus is pretty restrictive, I opened Nautilus by clicking “Documents” on the home screen, then a terminal using “File->Terminal”. Running nm-applet from the command line reveals a segfault. Running “sudo nm-applet” doesn’t cause a segfault and allows a connection, obviously lacking access to the keyring. Once connected to a network, running the update application shows a new version of nm-applet available. I ran the updates, rebooted and the issue is solved. It must have been broken in the last set of updates, ran before the user lost nm-applet.
Hope this helps someone. It does illustrate the downside of obfuscation – in this case the user has no feedback as to why there is no network connection.
We have Ubuntu installed on two of the machines at home and recently, after losing a Windows restore disc, I suggested installing Ubuntu 10.04 on her Dell 1545 after my suggestion.
As installations go, it was relatively painless – certainly better than reinstalling Windows. Don’t get me wrong, Dell is better than most in this respect as they gave us OEM install discs for Windows Vista, bundled software and the drivers. As strait forward as this is with Dell’s resource CD (it mostly tells you what you need), it doesn’t know any more than what model you own. This is problematic with the wireless card for example as there are two revision states and the drivers are incompatible with each other – one crashes Windows.
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In the interests of not becoming blinkered to one distribution, I thought I might give Fedora 11 a whirl. Not having used Fedora since FC4, I was surprised to see the adoption of a live CD installation and relieved to avoid a DVD size download. Just like Ubuntu it’s well polished, perhaps more so with graphical grub.
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Huawei E1550
Update: I’ve rewritten this article for 10.04.1, please post comments there and not here!
Update: You no longer need to install udev-extras in Ubuntu 10.04.
I picked up a Huawei E1550 pre-pay mobile broadband dongle, £39.99 with 3 Mobile including 3Gb usage (note it’s not the device they’re picturing).
I’m on a course next month so that’ll do fine, I have no reception at home and am not away enough to warrant a contract.
It appears to identify itself as USB storage, to install drivers on Windows then flip-flops to a modem. Nice idea, terrible implementation, even in Windows where it installs drivers every time you use a different USB port (it’s often wise to try such devices in Windows – so you don’t chase your tail with a faulty device). Pretty sure it’s the autorun program that’s flipping the device.
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I reinstalled Arch from scratch on an Aspire One today, something I haven’t done for a while. I’ve updated my wiki page to reflect the changes since the end of last year.
http://wiki.lynxworks.eu/aspireone/arch
