Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: October 8, 2003

  • Mandrake 9.1 on the HP ze4430us

    Today I tried out Mandrake 9.1 on my ze4430us laptop.  I tried Debian the other day with mild success, but I’m looking for something that ‘just works’ out of the box.  The Mandrake 9.1 install went just fine.  The install process was extremely easy and quite pretty.  One thing to note is that if you configure your mouse as a ‘Microsoft Wheel Mouse,’ you’ll be able to use the scroll pad to the right of the touchpad.

    The major problem that I have with Mandrake 9.1 is that it hangs while initializing PCMCIA, which is a classic death scene for many Linux distros.  I was able to get around it by passing PCMCIA=no to the kernel at boot.  Unless there’s a reasonably easy fix, Mandrake 9.1 probably isn’t going to work for me, since I need to use a PCMCIA Wi-Fi card.  I am currently downloading 9.2-rc2 to see if that will solve my problems.

    Overall I was impressed with Mandrake.  The install process was easy but at the same time allowed me to put various dialogs into ‘expert’ or ‘advanced’ mode.  The package selection was pretty straightforward, and it allowed me to select individual packages.

    Once I was able to get it to boot, everything looked nice.  The desktop is minimal yet functional, with pretty much everything you need on the start menu (the foot or the K depending on your environment of choice).  I have not really had a chance to poke around, but it seems quite zippy with clean lines.

    I’ll be installing another OS this evening, but I think I’ll be keeping a Mandrake partition, at least for now.

    Update: 9.2rc2 still hangs at PCMCIA init.  🙁

  • Roundup: From Mobiles to Grids

    Lots of little things are happeneing all around:

    • Russ has been looking into the latest ECMAScript, which is much more object oriented.  Jeremy Allaire has noticed Russ’ recent interest in Flash.
    • V. Satheesh Babu went down to to an Oracle 10g launch in DC yesterday.  Lots of marketing types and everyone stalking government employees.  It’s a good thing I didn’t know about it.
    • Jeremy Zawodny shows you how to roll your own Yahoo! News RSS feeds.
    • Steve Makofsky tried and cancelled unlimited GPRS on his MS Smartphone.  Unlimited GPRS is $9.99 a month here, and I’m on the plan.  Granted, GPRS coverage is spotty in some suburban/rural areas around town, but most of the time I will be able to moblog a picture via email or hop on IRC if I’m bored.
    • Steve Makofsky: “As always, .NET Rocks makes time at the gym go by pretty quick. I’m just glad other people don’t know what i’m listening to on my iPod.”
    • Webunit 1.3.2, a web application testing framework for Python is out.
    • InfoWorld takes a look at developers shunning the latest and greatest in web application frameworks.
    • CNet:”Internet phone providers have won the first round in a clash with state regulators, providing needed momentum for the upstart industry.”  Go go VoIP!
    • Ewan puts his thoughts on the future of OPL development on Series 60 down on virtual paper.  I listened in on the hoops required to compile and package an OPL hello world app into an installable .sis file.  It’s currently insane.
    • Six Apart launched Typepad officially after their preview release.  They also were interviewed [quicktime] on CNN.  Congrats!