I tried a bunch of live distros on Becky's laptop while waiting for her new HD.
and the winner was SimplyMEPIS because it connected to our wifi network.
Auto detected the Dell wifi card! None of the others did.
Though I did have to downgrade to WEP security, so not a permanent solution.
And no, I am not willing to dig through the documentation to get the WPA supplicant working.
I am a lazy linux fan.
However, I was impressed enough to put it on a spare HD in my main machine and give it a go.
I installed grub on the spare drive (primary slave) and use the bios's boot selector option to get to linux.
(Because I've reached my lifetime quota of messed up windows boot sectors from these linux experiments)
Well, the results look good.
1280x1024 desktop.
Open Office is nice.
Networking is EASY now. Even into our home network XP workgroup shares.
The only editing I had to do was a slight change to the GUI produced etc/cups/printers.conf file.
Of course it took at least an hour to find out what to add to the one line I had to change.
And then another 15 min to discover that I had to completely reboot instead of just restarting the printer service to get it to print right. sigh....
But still, I'm impressed.
I printed Becky's daily London Times Crossword from firefox on the linux box to our shared windows Brother 1440 laser printer, and it looked pretty good.
And edited and saved a spreadsheet on our mirrored share with Open Office.
Not ready for prime time, but it's coming along.
Watch out MS
and the winner was SimplyMEPIS because it connected to our wifi network.
Auto detected the Dell wifi card! None of the others did.
Though I did have to downgrade to WEP security, so not a permanent solution.
And no, I am not willing to dig through the documentation to get the WPA supplicant working.
I am a lazy linux fan.
However, I was impressed enough to put it on a spare HD in my main machine and give it a go.
I installed grub on the spare drive (primary slave) and use the bios's boot selector option to get to linux.
(Because I've reached my lifetime quota of messed up windows boot sectors from these linux experiments)
Well, the results look good.
1280x1024 desktop.
Open Office is nice.
Networking is EASY now. Even into our home network XP workgroup shares.
The only editing I had to do was a slight change to the GUI produced etc/cups/printers.conf file.
Of course it took at least an hour to find out what to add to the one line I had to change.
And then another 15 min to discover that I had to completely reboot instead of just restarting the printer service to get it to print right. sigh....
But still, I'm impressed.
I printed Becky's daily London Times Crossword from firefox on the linux box to our shared windows Brother 1440 laser printer, and it looked pretty good.
And edited and saved a spreadsheet on our mirrored share with Open Office.
Not ready for prime time, but it's coming along.
Watch out MS
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