Gordaen's Blog

I survived my move this past weekend. I hate moving. I hate packing. I hate unpacking. The whole process basically sucks, and I’ll be quite happy when I can finally “settle down” and not have to worry about moving again (at least not for a long time).

I had to buy a wireless adapter, so that I could get online. I bought an overpriced Netgear USB adapter, thinking USB would be more likely to work without a hassle in Linux. Well, I saw that the system was aware of a device being connected in the syslog, but that’s about as far as I got. I had no way to get online. I suspected that ndiswrapper might solve the problem, but I couldn’t exactly download it.

I ended up installing Windows on my older hard drive (for once I was glad that XP doesn’t notice SATA drives because I knew that meant it wouldn’t screw up Linux). I have been thinking about getting a Windows partition set up again for a while because a lot of the jobs I have looked at require experience with various Windows-only programs.

Everything went as well as can be expected with Windows. The fun part was that the software from Netgear that is supposed to manage the wireless connections would not connect to anything. It did all sorts of buggy things but never even accidentally worked. The really fun part is that it interfered with the Windows program that manages wireless connections. If I disabled Netgear’s software, the Windows software would sometimes not see any networks, sometimes do that pointless “limited connectivity” thing, and sometimes kind of work. It was also wonderful how every time I restarted my computer the Netgear software would come up and make things not work. I eventually uninstalled it, which made the adapter useless, so I reinstalled it and picked the option to use the Windows network manager. I’m not sure why the drivers aren’t separate from the connection manager.

It will probably be a while before I am posting regularly again, but I’ll get back to it at some point.