10:30 AM Another weekend gone. Sigh.

Spent part of the weekend working on my laptop; Linux is still not complete. It's almost complete; there's just one small problem with it - the network card doesn't. At all. I've tried several different suggestions, from IBM tech support, from various web sites, from newsgroups, and even from our very own Tom, who had a ThinkPad once upon a time. The card works beautifully under Windows, but not under Linux.

Now, IBM swears up and down that this card is "fully Linux compatable." They won't say what, exactly, the card is - it's labelled "IBM 10/100 EtherJet CardBus" - but that it's fully compatable (they seem to like that phrase) with a Xircom card, which does work under Linux.

The users tell a different story.

There are at least five known versions of this card; not known because they have different model numbers, but only because some of them work, and some of them don't. Some work part of the time. Others claim to work but don't actually do anything, and a rare few can't make up their mind about what they do.

Mine seems to be one that doesn't work. Every trick has been tried, every patch applied, even the kernel has been recompiled. Still nothing. I think it's time to invest in a different brand of card; I think highly of 3Com's MegaHertz line.

Everything else does work, however, even including the sound and the modem. The modem has some odd quirks - when connecting or disconnecting, the computer freezes completely for a few seconds - but it works. Good enough.

The other project for the weekend was Keri's machine, ANYA. She's been running Windows 98, and it's been causing continuous problems. For various hardware reasons, including but not limited to USB devices and DVD, NT won't work on that machine; but Windows 2000 would be very nice, indeed. It has the RAM, disk space, and processor for the job; so this weekend, we decided it was time to bite the bullet and upgrade.

One problem. The video is provided by the DVD controller; it's an early-AGP chipset by Chromatic. Anybody spotted the problem? There is no Chromatic anymore. Hence, there are no Windows 2000 drivers, and there ain't never a-gonna be any Windows 2000 drivers. So a new video card is in order; probably a low-end ATI Xpert card, PCI bus since the AGP in that machine is not available. (Integrated chipset, you see, and no slot available even when it's disabled.)

And now it's Monday, and my first day on the job in a full office; everyone's been off to San Mateo for two weeks of training. Should be interesting...

Early Or late Monday, I don't know. Want to make something of it? <SEG>

I'm watching the hub lights flash furiously as I download Mandrake 7.1, released this evening (although there's no official notice on the Mandrake web site.

So, I can hear you saying - what, ANOTHER new installation? Well, yeah, but not just Mandrake. I'll do a couple practice installs, see how I like it. But, I also solved my network card problem the easy way - I bought a new one. Specifically, I bid for and won a new-in-the-box 3Com Etherlink III PCMCIA card. Only 10 Mb, but that's more than good enough - at home, that's all my hub supports, anyway, and even at work, I mostly need it for surfing and email - and even with two T1s, I won't be saturating a 10 Mbit line any time soon. The price was right; $10, seller pays shipping. I can live with that.

But this is a good opportunity to post something else - a couple of people have asked me about how I got Linux and Windows 2000 to dual-boot. Well, honestly, it was simple. Here's exactly what I did, step by step;

1.) Install Windows 2000 first, at the front of the drive; just a normal install. Make sure you leave room at the back of the drive (or on another drive) for Linux.

2.) Install Linux, using CD, network, or HD. Do everything normally until you get to the point where you install LILO. Go ahead and install it on the Master Boot Record of the primary hard drive; that's the default option. Whatever distro you're using should then ask about your boot images; select "Add" or the equivalent. Make a label for Windows, pointing to /hda/hd1. Mandrake makes it really simple; select "Add", click the "Other OS" button, accept the default partition - and it's prelabeled windows. Choose which one you want as the default, and you're done. My laptop boots to a LILO prompt; after five seconds, it boots to Windows 2000, unless I type in "linux" and hit enter, first. The Windows boot process is normal; I get the OS listing of Windows 2000 or Previous version of Windows (meaning my bare-bones CD drivers and nothing else) and everything proceeds. Windows simply doesn't see those 5 GB that are allocated to Linux.

Midnight What a difference a day makes. Seriously, I don't know wether to laugh or waht.

Here's the deal. Remember that laptop thing, and how I had it set up? Forget it.

Part one; I used a utility named Bootpart to change around the way this machine boots. I found it as part of an emailed discussion with Shawn, on the merits of dual-booting using Lilo vs. NT's bootloader. I decided that if I could manage it, I'd rather use the menu-driven Windows 2000 bootloader; so off I went on my merry way. Actually, it wasn't too difficult; Step One was to use Bootpart to create a bootfile for Linux. That's easy; copy the executable to the hard drive (I ended up with it in C:\winnt\system32\) and execute the command "bootpart 4 bootpart.lnx" where "4" is replaced by the partition number of your Linux boot partition (revealed by typing "bootpart" alone) and "bootpart.lnx" being the name of the file, which could be anything you want. Then, edit the boot.ini file; add the line at the end "c:\bootpart.lnx = "Linux". That's almost it; now we have to replace the MBR to get rid of Lilo.

DO NOT USE THE CLASSIC "FDISK /MBR" UNDER NT OR WINDOWS 2000.

Doing so will delete your NT/2000 boot files. OK? Don't do it. Actually, under NT you don't have a choice; do FDISK /MBR, then recreate the boot files using the NT Setup disks. For Windows 2000, boot to the recovery console (either use the setup floppies or hit F8 at the boot menu and select it) and execute the command "fixmbr". And you're done. You now dual-boot between Windows and Linux using the Windows boot loader.

That was relatively pleasant; it's taken me longer to describe it than it did to do it. The frustrating part comes later, after dinner.

I just edited and published this in linux, on my laptop. What's that? Published, I hear you say? But doesn't that require <dramatic pause> a network card? Yup. It does. No, I don't have my newly purchased 3Com yet. Do the math.

The frustrating part is that I don't know WHY it works. Here's the story;

I had downloaded Mandrake 7.1 last night; since it's my favorite distribution, and the family Linux workstation is non-funtional until I get Keri's new video card, I decided to install it on my laptop. Why not? I wouldn't be using the Linux portion until I could get connectivity through it, anyway.

Now, I had disabled the PCMCIA systems in Mandrake 7.0, to avoid the annoying "error" messages and beeps as Linux detected the card but failed to initialize it. So I completely ignored the card; as a matter of fact, I had forgotten it was there. During the (much improved) installation, Mandrake asked if I wanted it to try to find PCMCIA card. Sure, I thought. Why not.

The dongle lit up.

Damnit.

The card didn't quite work yet; but it initialized properly. I had to make two changes to get it to work;

1.) I renamed "/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S45pcmcia" to "/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S09pcmcia"; this changes the order of the initialization scripts, so the pcmcia drivers load before the network drivers do.
2.) I added four lines to "/etc/pcmcia/config";

card "IBM 10/100 EtherJet CardBus"
version "IBM", "10/100 EtherJet CardBus", "IBMC-10/100"
bind "tulip_cb"

Hmm. Well, let's go for broke; the modem auto-detected and worked. The only non-functional device; the sound card. Download the ASLA drivers (I don't remember where I got them; they're all over the place) ./configure, make clean, make all, make install, done. Do that with the drivers, the libraries, and the utilities. That's supposed to do the trick; it had been erratic before.

I'm listening to MP3's as I type this. The quality is the same as under Windows.

So were the problems with the old Mandrake? I don't think so. See, everything on every web site I could find confirmed my experience; a very few people got the NIC to work; they were few and far between. Most of them managed it by rewriting their drivers to match their cards; I don't have that skill. They did it under RedHat, Debian, Mandrake, Slackware, all with the same results.

The sound, too, was erratic. Under all distros.

So how come it works now? I don't know. It does, that's all I know. Tomorrow I need to write a Perl script to switch the network settings between home and work; and that, as they say, will be that. I still have that other NIC; I've got another machine at the office I can use that in, though, so it's not a total loss.

And now, to bed. Let's hope it still works in the morning...

12:00 PM Well. Ain't this fun? <SEG> This thing actually, more or less, works the way I want it too. I spent most of yesterday playing in Linux, rather than Windows, and there are very, very few things I can't do that I need. Those few things are probably replaceable, but I just haven't found them yet.

Number 1. Visio. I use Visio a LOT, it's the best tool available for communicating with pointy-headed business-type people just why you need that new tech-toy. I redesigned our entire network; took me three days of number crunching, thinking, and scribbling all over an 8' whiteboard. When I finally decided what I wanted to do, it took me twenty minutes to lay out the whole thing in Visio, with complete diagrams, symbols for all the equipment, and text tags for each item so that a mouseover pulls up the information on what it is, what it does, why it's there, and what it will cost. I would sooner give up my right arm than give up Visio. Well, maybe my left arm.

Number 2. Information management. This one I've heard others express; email, calendar, contact management, notes, all in one spot. I understand that there's Kpad and Kalendar and God only knows how many applications to do each of those; but here's the thing, gang, I want an information management application. That doesn't mean I want to apply myself to information management; I have other things to do. I want an application that sorts my email, organizes my time, keeps track of who I know and how to reach them, and does it all without pissing me off. I spent most of that time yesterday hunting down applications to do all of that, and I never found one. You know what I wound up using for email? Netscape. And I HATE Netscape. But it was the only one that would let me create folders and filter mail to them in what I considered a reasonable amount of effort. Nothing matches Outlook, though; right click, New Folder, name it, select the message you want filtered there, click Organize, 9 out of 10 times the right information is already selected, select Create Rule, Yes I want to run it now - and done. Back to, you know, my JOB. That's about as slick as you can make it without a neural interface. Oh, a voice command sequence like "Computer, filter all messages from Tim to a new folder" would be faster - but you're missing some information, namely where the folder should be and if there's anything else you'd like to do. Say, "Computer, filter all email from Tim into a folder named Tim, under Work, and mark any messages from him as Important." The only reason that's faster is because you can talk faster than you can mouse - I hope.

Oh, but that's not all. I want to grab an email from my boss about a meeting, drag it to my calendar, and have it create a new meeting with the email in the notes field. Ideally, it would parse out the time of the meeting and create it, but I'll settle for having to type that in myself.

That's all I want, guys. Microsoft managed to keep me reasonably happy with something like that, and if Microsoft is so bad, surely you can manage to do at least as well, right? Right?

As I said, I spent quite a bit of time in Mandrake 7.1 yesterday. Overall impression? This ROCKS. Oh, I know, it's all standard stuff; I could load it in any distribution. But I didn't have to; the installer did it for me. The installer itself is much, much better, with all of the big things I disliked about 7.0 repaired and most of the small things. They did add one annoyance - what's with the stars for radio buttons? Who came up with that one?

It just WORKS. XFree86 4.0 is included if you do an Expert install, but it doesn't work with my video, so I didn't play with it. One interesting bit; the installer checked my video when I attempted 4.0, warned me the card itself wasn't supported but the chipset was. Did I want to test if the configuration would work? Warning: Testing this chipset can be dangerous!

Well, that wasn't very confident-sounding, so I said no. Xfree86 3.x worked fine, as expected, and everything worked. Curiosity, though, wouldn't leave me alone; 3.x also has to check for the settings to my card, but it doesn't give any such warnings. Where was the difference? So I tested it on a few other systems I have lying around the office. 4.0 only WORKED on one system, and it didn't look or feel all that different from 3. The others ranged from "don't bother, I don't know what this is" (or words to that effect) to the error I got with the laptop. BUT there's another, similar error that doesn't include the "DANGER" warning. What's up? Some cards are dangerous, but others aren't, apparently. Odd.

And I spoke with someone in the upper-levels of management here at Siebel. The interesting bit is that he'd heard my name before - his words - and knew who I was, even though I'd never met him or talked to him before, nor is he working directly with anyone here. Hmmm. This could be good, or it could be bad. Be interesting to find out which.

Finally, I got a question by email about the name of this machine. Well, it has two names. The first, required for access into Siebel's main network, is just a jumble of letters and numbers. But it has a linux (DNS) hostname that doesn't have anything to do with Siebel; ANGEL. Keri named it, and it fits; it's all black, often "moody" (it doesn't always do what I want, when I want it - something I miss from my old workstation, MINERVA) and it has a "light side" and a "dark side" - which can be taken two different ways. Either the black outside, bright LCD, or Windows on one half, Linux on the other. <G>. To christen it, the start-up sound effect in Windows and Linux is a .wav file of the Angel TV show theme. Interesting bit of music; slow, moody strings (cello and viola, I think) change abruptly to a faster, slightly more upbeat rock beat; the strings are still there, though, throughout the music, even with the faster beat. Excellent for such a short piece (47 secs). Old and new, with a solid theme binding them together. If you're interested, the .wav is here.

4:00 PM OK. The combination of Angel and Mandrake 7.1 get the Cold Dead Fingers Award. Seriously. If I could just find an information manager that I liked.... and no, Tom, Magellan's not there yet. I agree it looks promising; but the latest development build doesn't cut the moldy Jello, much less the mustard. I tried it; after much fiddling and playing, I got it working. I won't recount the sad tale here because A) I was too frustrated with it to take notes and B) the end result wasn't worth. It core dumped on me three times, I was getting duplicate emails, one incomplete email, and one - no different from any other, so far as I could see - that reliably crashed it. Part of that might have been my fault, as the installation is by no stretch simple, even by Linux standards - but that's not an excuse. I'll wait for the final version, and we'll see.

Other than that, this is great. I just spent the afternoon in KDE (I prefer Enlightenment, but I needed an app that just wouldn't work there) with all four desktops completely filled. I took a screenshot, but it reveals a wee bit too much sensitive info, doncha know. But visualize:

Four virtual desktops, each at 1024 x 768. 1 has Netscape, 2 has Netscape Mail, 3 has Eterm (with the Nebula background - another neat little trick) and 4 has XEmacs. That's the start. Fire up XMMS to play me some amusements in my headphones (temporary offices are all in one room, which is not very convenient). No problem; faster than in Windows 2000 with the same load. But, hey, this is a Coppermine 500 with almost 400 MB of RAM - that's to be expected.

Now the WORK starts. <G>

Two more XEmacs windows, four terminal windows, one of which is compiling the latest patched build of SSH. Two XEMacs windows have multiple buffers (more than one document), and three of the buffers are over 1000 lines of Perl code. The other - hang on, lemme check - seven buffers have various fragments of test code (the reason for the other terminal windows; I check subsections by themselves before loading into the real program. XMMS (WinAmp for Linux; even looks like WinAmp) is still going strong; crackles a little when there's a lot of disk activity, but there really isn't much. StarOffice has two Excel documents open (true Excel docs; they go back and forth pretty well) and one Word document (those don't translate as well. Too bad.) I've got a network TCP/IP packet sniffer running (one of the Perl scripts is a server client, so I need to watch it do its thing) BlueFish is open, editing this page. (Version .4, Brian. Take a look if you don't have it already.) Oh, and gftp is downloading some more Siebel IT policy documents for me.

It's just as fast as before. There's no hesitation when I type, the music continues uninterrupted (aside from the aforementioned heavy-disk-usage problem) even the compiler is running fine.

And now, it's time to start cleaning up; in the temp offices, we have a clean desk policy. Besides, "Love in an Elevator" just came on. <SEG>