Month: February 2008

Twisted Logic

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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. … Read more

Big Switch 4: Softly Softly

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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.

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Sorry Sir, your phone is broken

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jeepney-icon.jpgSo, 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.

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Big Switch 3: Tweaking and Troubleshooting

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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.

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Big Switch 2: Installation Day

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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.

  • hda1 – Windows Partition – 20Gb
  • hda2 – IBM restore partition – 4Gb
  • hda3 -Extended partition, containing 36Gb
    • hda4 – my data partition. 36 Gb.

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