20080724 on the road to ruin how being good at this tech stuff can get you into all sorts of trouble your neighbor wouldnt even try - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: On the Road to Ruin: How being good at this tech stuff can get you into all sorts of trouble your neighbor wouldn't even try link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/on-the-road-to-ruin-how-being-good-at-this-tech-stuff-can-get-you-into-all-sorts-of-trouble-your-neighbor-wouldnt-even-try/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 485 created: 2008/07/24 03:12:05 created_gmt: 2008/07/24 03:12:05 comment_status: open post_name: on-the-road-to-ruin-how-being-good-at-this-tech-stuff-can-get-you-into-all-sorts-of-trouble-your-neighbor-wouldnt-even-try status: publish post_type: post

On the Road to Ruin: How being good at this tech stuff can get you into all sorts of trouble your neighbor wouldn't even try

The saga on my new T61 laptop from work continues.

In our last episode, frustrated by the total hosing of my new machine upon installing SP3 on the pristine Win XP image very excellently crafted by my good friend and colleague, Dave Presser, I once again threw caution to the wind and decided to reformat and install CentOS 5.2 x86_64 on the thing.

That went well. Which should have been a warning to me. No good deed goes unpunished.

Sitting here now, struggling to keep my eyes open until I can get to sleep just a little early tonight in preparation for a nice 4 day weekend, I find myself going over what I’ve learned, trying to sort out what will make instructive posts in the days to come.

Well, first of all, after going out and buying a super nice e-SATA and USB 2.0 enclosure for a stock Seagate 500 Gb 7200 rpm SATA drive, I’ve come to the conclusion that the cost-competitive Western Digital MyBook with the same capacity actually looks nicer and is probably better constructed.

Then there are the many little annoyances that come with putting Linux on a machine that was designed from the ground up to run Windows. Like issues with getting the O/S to recognize the built-in Intel 4965 wireless card, and how it really only took 3 of 6 packages from Axel Thimm’s repo to get it to work on the latest centosplus kernel — one of them being a kernel module that will need to be upgraded on the next kernel update. Thank God NetworkManager finally works — well, most of the time.

(Note that since CentOS 5.3 moved up to a kernel 2.6.18-128 that, among other things includes atheros wireless support out of the box, things have become much easier: case in point is that the 4965 now only needs the iwl3945-firmware package from rpmforge, or Red Hat, to work).

Evolution as a MS Exchange client. Seriously. Cheesy config screens. Overall clumsy user interfaces. Really badly implemented security. “Remember this password” dialogs that don’t actually commit anything, so you get prompted again and again. Half-baked address book integration with the Global Catalog (won’t work for me, and I’m an e-admin with intimate knowledge of who has what FSMO role). Really aggravating “sort descending” by default message listing. Calendar objects that stubbornly refuse to disappear when a cancellation message is accepted.

VMWare. Or is it VMware? Laptop has 2 network interfaces. Hardwire RJ-45 that plugs into LAN, and wireless (once you’ve got that working, see above). Wasted hour trying to figure out why machine that worked perfectly (almost, except for out-of-sync clock) all day long now won’t connect to network. Ugh. At work was plugged into the switch (well, desktop hub initially, company won’t spring for a new switch). Here at home running wireless. So VM guest needs to have 2 virtual network cards configured. One for the default bridged network (vmnet1), the other for the wireless (vmnet2). After vmware-config.pl reconfig of network, and going into guest config to add second card — voila! We’re connected!

Anyway, need to go to bed now. This weekend will tackle time sync issue. Something about CPU cycle divider used by shipping CentOS kernel. Need to try some user space options before I go there though.

All this just to run Linux on my work machine.

If SP3 had just loaded without blowing the thing up I could have spent the evening finishing another chapter in The Peloponnesian War.