So I probably didn’t mention the incident last weekend when three Smart Broadband employees came and sat at my house and watched files download. I was demonstrating to them how slow my connection is, and the fact that it is impossible for me to download any large files, or watch any streaming media. I’ve been complaining about this for the last 5 months, on and off, so I was delighted to finally get some response. Read the rest of this entry »
OK a quick recap from my last post, where I realised that then next step was going to take some explaining … A week or so went by without incident and it was time to consider the final stage: moving Windows to a virtual machine and getting rid of the old Windows partition. Here are the main stages.
Taxis in Manila do one of two things: If you’re standing there waiting for a taxi to appear, they hide. Sometimes they’ll drive by with the light on, but they won’t stop, because that just means they forgot to switch the light off. You can wave your arms around, shout, whistle, whatever you like, but you’ll be waiting quite some time.
However, if you have no need of a taxi and are just walking down the street, they stalk you. They drive past and honk, slow down and crawl past you, and (especially irritating this one) if you try to cross the road, they’ll actually stop in front of you and block you from crossing, under the misapprehension that you want to get into their cab.
So, if you’re waiting for a cab, start walking and one will find you soon enough.
I’m not even going to bother mentioning the bargaining and fights over whether or not they’re going to use the meter. Oh no. Suffice it to say if a taxi driver uses the meter without arguing, I give them a tip. If they haggle, bargain, whine or try to cheat me in any way, they get no tip at all. Except if they do that “pretending not to have change” routine. Grrrr.
I was in Church the other weekend attending a mass. As I’m not a religious person, my attention was beginning to wander. Some birds had taken up residence in the roof, so I was watching them for a while, which struck me as mildly odd.
Then the choir started up to lead the congregation in a hymn. The words to the hymn appeared on a vast screen suspended from the ceiling, so that the congregation could follow along with them. As I watched, a dialog box popped up, suggesting that the virus sofware was out of date. Someone hurriedly dispatched it. It appeared again, suggesting that the trial period had expired and that it might be a good time to buy the software. It was dispatched again. Oh for a camera.
I did wonder if the congregation would start singing along with the words on the AV dialog box, but unfortunately they remained focused on the words of the hymn. Admirable. But broken.
So now I had all the software installed and working correctly I could catch up with work, and just get used to using Linux on a day to day basis. I also had the security of a fully functional Windows installation to fall back on, should everything go wrong, or should I have forgotten to copy something across.
But up until now, I’d only been using a Wired connection. The built-in wireless on my Thinkpad R51e didn’t work with Ubuntu, and a few attempts to fix it were not rewarded with success. I decided to wait until I had a weekend free to sort it all out. In the interim, if I needed wireless, I had a Buffalo Airport PCMCIA card which worked perfectly when I plugged it in. Read the rest of this entry »
I was walking back from the supermarket yesterday and saw a guy relieving himself against a fence. OK, so it was broad daylight, and its not an altogether uncommon phenomenon here. However … the fence was a chicken wire fence, and it separated him from a busy road – the one I was walking along. Everything was out on display.
He still had his shoulders hunched against the prying eyes behind him though …
Now we’ve got the box booting correctly its time to install some useful pieces of software, and fix a couple of things that don’t work quite right out of the box. Your mileage may vary with this section, as some of the software choices are personal.
OK first golden rule of any Linux install, update all the existing software. As Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian (uh, that’s enough …), then we use:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
… and go away and get a coffee, ‘cos on a 47 kbyte connection this takes a while. Actually make that a coffee, a visit to the gym and lunch.
So, if you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that the villain of the last piece, Smart Telecommunications — wait, let me try that again — “Smart” Telecommunications, have a sub-standard internet service. I also have my mobile phone account with them, which could come under the category of having all your eggs in one basket.
3G, doesn’t work. That’s pretty much it. For the first three months I was here, whenever I was at home, I couldn’t make or receive calls, or send or receive SMS. If I stepped out of the building and into a different cell zone, everything was usually dandy, but at home, where I spend most of my time, nothing. I spent two months complaining several times a week at their office and over the phone. However both these approaches were fraught with difficulty – in their offices the 3G signal was perfect, of course, and to complain from home … well its pretty hard if your phone doesn’t work. My girlfriend’s phone (also a Smart subscription) also didn’t work in my apartment despite both phones having a 5-bar signal. Read the rest of this entry »
OK, so we did the research and installed the chosen distribution in the last part. Now we’re going to fix some of the problems.
As I mentioned before, this Thinkpad R51e doesn’t play nice with Linux. I tried several distributions on it, and none of them worked perfectly out of the box, leading me to believe that Lenovo had slipped some non-standard hardware in there.
Having chosen the distribution and done some research on the feasibility of the move (see Part 1.), it was time to make some space for the installation.
My hard disk was originally set up with the partitions as follows.