Echoes of the underwater world

During Christmas week i installed Ubuntu Warthy on my mother in law’s laptop. It’s a very old Toshiba laptop with no network adapter, 64 Megs of RAM, 6 Gigs of hard drive and a very small 640×480 display. It was kind of hard to install it correctly with absolutely no internet connection. I had to burn a CDRW almost 12 times to put the necessary packages on it so that i could upgrade cups drivers and install some new ones.

After a lot of efforts i got it to work but it was quite useless without any network connections. I had to explain for 20 minutes that the modem (winmodem) was not supported, and that it was useless to use a modem dialup connection when their house already had ADSL connection with a Wifi router doing NAT.

Reading some blogs from Hubert Figuiere about a working from scratch SMC wifi card i bought one for her laptop remotely from Spain, and got it delivered directly at their place. Some days after that Hubert updates his post and explain the card won’t work…. Indeed…

I finally managed to find my old 3Com 11Mbps wireless orinoco based card and got it shipped to their house. That one worked… Wooohooo !

We configured Evolution, Gaim, Firefox, etc… I also guided her to enable apt repositories to do some upgrades on the machine. The update ran all night long and the next day the machine was not booting anymore. Now she is calling me explaining that the computer won’t boot and say that /dev/console can not be opened and the kernel is in panic because someone attempted to kill init…

So it’s now 1 month and a half and i m back at the start with this laptop, i will have to wait for them to come down to Spain so that i can finally install it from here (again) and update it (again)…

Hand me over the bottle of Whisky please…