Tiiiiiired.

[silveradept]

Well, after prodding, poking, cussing, rebooting (a godawful lot of that), and generally having no luck, I said "screw't" and gave up on making WPA-enabled wireless work on annaonthemoon's laptop. So I removed the offending OS... and then spent many more hours prodding, poking, cussing, causing kernel panics, and rebooting (ye gods, a lot of that)... but I did manage to get everything back the way it was. Her laptop is whole now, with one partition that correctly reports its size. If she decides to play around with any other OS, from here on out, she's on her own, at least for the laptop. Desktop stuff is generally easier to work with, and should prove to install much easier.

So I've learned my lesson about trying to install an OS on a friend's system - check and make very sure that it works right out of the box, with little to no errors, and the little, make sure they're easily fixable. A solution by compiling is acceptable to some users, but to me, it never seems to work quite right, and so I can't usually do it.

Anyway, been sitting on this link for a bit. Mostly waiting for a stable copy to appear Children of polygamists rally to allow their parents to marry. If it's a loving, stable, financially secure relationship, why not? Although one does wonder how taxes get filed in such a household.

Library humor. This is the sort of thing that I would half-expect to see when applying for a job.

Bush says we're in Iraq until he leaves office. Which, if the democratic process isn't subverted, and barring any oddities like an impeachment, will be 2009. Two-three more years of this quagmire. Hopefully the body count doesn't get too high before those in charge can finally withdraw themselves.

Longevity genes may be so because they stop cancer from accelerating. It's an interesting thought - I'm not sure I'm ready to get on the bandwagon quite yet, though. Still, there's a lot to unlock from the genome.

Christians say that abstinence isn't enough in South Africa. Current efforts, even the ones that include protection, aren't really being enough, for one reason or another. But it's taking an out-of-control HIV to get the church on board for this. Would they say the same advice to people here in the U.S.?

Anyway, I'm really tired. So bedtime for me. Hopefully I'll be able to flop out and relax tomorrow, as I don't think there are any scheduled tasks...

Comments

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

if the democratic process isn't subverted

That's a big "if." (http://www.diebold.com/)

The good news is that it's looking increasingly likely that, barring election fraud, the Democrats will be taking back both houses of Congress in '06. I'm not terribly excited about the prospect of President Nancy Pelosi, but it's a damnsight better than what we've got now.

[shenalia.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, with or without Bush or Congress's involvement, the way the military outlook is on the ground right now, we are guaranteed to be there in at least some fashion through that point in any case. Bringing that up is a pointless gesture.

Trust me, no matter who's in charge, you can forget about a 100% pull-out. Unless the country gets nuked and we are absolutely forced to get our guys out or lose them in the process... just a realistic look at the situation, that's all I'm saying.

(Once again, that cynicism is showing up...)

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) The library humour: any idea what the third joke (besides the two clear ones) is?

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

The article says that polygamy was outlaewed in 1890 in Utah, but yet there are so many people who still practice it, i'm not ure how it can be considered "outlawed".

I son't see the big deal with polygamy. I look at ithe the same way I view same sex marriage -- if it makes those people happy, so be it. I know people in poly relationships (not marriage ones) who are quite happy in their relationships, so why not just let them live their lives the way they want? As long as all parties involved know about it...who cares?

--
Thanks for working on my computer...i'm still bummed out that Linux didn't work. You *did* check my wifi card and according to websites you checked, it *does* work...I still say it works, it's just that it was having particular problems with my router, since it was able to connect to the unsecured at your house. Ah, well. I really wish it had worked.

[jokermage.livejournal.com]

Which, if the democratic process isn't subverted, and barring any oddities like an impeachment, will be 2009.

Wishful Thinking! XD

[jokermage.livejournal.com]

President Nancy Pelosi

Are you trying to get me to move to Canada? I had chills tap dancing on my spine when I read that.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Secured (encrypted) wireless connections are much more finicky than unsecured ones, unfortunately.

I assume that, since you were using WPA, Silver was running wpa_supplicant on top of whatever card driver he was using (probably ndiswrapper since he mentioned that there's only Windows support)? I found (recently), that this will work, with a little prodding; you just need to double check everything twice and remember that you won't get an actual connection with DHCP unless you directly run dhclient to request one.

...okay, that was a little techy, but...

[jokermage.livejournal.com]

http://forums.questionablecontent.net/viewtopic.php?t=12231

Have at it

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

where were you last night? :-P

yes, we were trying ndiswrapper, and the drivers that I had found on another website, and i'm not really sure what else he tried, as for most of the time I was trying to stay out of the angry dragon's way!

It worked when it was hardwired into the router, but then as soon as we unplugged it, it tanked and got "no connection".

I'd love to be able to convince him to help me re-do this again, but as we installed/uninstalled Linux like 4 times yesterday...I don't think he'd be willig again to fight with my Isolde.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

The issue would have been that ndiswrapper can sit on top of Windows drivers in order to get the card to talk to Linux, but it can't do any of the fancy encryption stuff that you need on a secured connection. So, you need to run ndiswrapper, and then wpa_supplicant (which handles the encryption/decryption on top of what ndiswrapper does), and then dhclient, which negotiates the actual TCP/IP connection (on top of what the other programs are doing) which is actually what your computer uses to talk to the Internet.
Of the three, dhclient normally just works once a connection is present, so the issue would have either been with an incorrectly configured wpa_supplicant, or a driver issue with ndiswrapper.

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Also, is it not possible to try this from a Linux Live CD, like the Ubuntu one, or possibly Knoppix? That would involve no actual installation of stuff on your computer, but you might be able to play around enough to get an idea of if things would ever work.

(What're your wireless card and router, incidently, so I can check...?)

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I wonder if SA tried that last night or not, and if he didn't try it, I wonder why we were unable to google that solution.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

The card is an internal Intel Pro 2200BG

the current router is a linksys wireless G, and at my mom's we have a netgear...but i'm not sure of it's type.

[silveradept]

My geek-fu wasn't quite up to the ability in finding the Windows driver to use properly - the ndiswrapper that we had was asking for an .inf file so that it could find the driver. Now, if I could have just stuck in a .sys and it would have been peachy with that, we could have tried to do the whole ndiswrapper-wpa_supplicant-dhclient thing. But I wasn't sure. So if it does work in some sort/fashion, you should write a walkthrough for annaonthemoon on how to get everything configured in that way, and then she'll be very happy. Because then she can find how to use ntfs-3g to write to the other side of her hard drive and the removable one she's got, and there's adept and automatix for the rest...

...so anyway, yeah. I'm not geeky enough to fix the problems, and rather than spend a lot more time in frustration because nothing works, I gave up on it and proceeded to spend a lot of time in frustration trying to get it back to the way it was.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I just wish it hadn't caused so much frustrations, really.


hey, did your power blip out? mine went out while I was in the shower. At least I had a window in the bathroom.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Thank you. (Grr. Tricky.)