UPDATE: Using ndiswrapper

It's great being able to use your laptop anywhere (kitchen, bathroom, garden).

I bought a Netgear MA521, as unforutnately the MA401 has been discontinued.

The MA521 uses a Realtek 8180 chipset. If you search for 8180 you should find the linux drivers.

Sadly they do not provide all the source code, but instead a provide you with a object file. After a slight tweak to the source code they did provide, compilation proceeded okay.

The link LED keeps blinking, but other than that it works a treat!

Well after banging my head against the wall with this one I thought I'd share.

Been trying to put SuSE 8.2 on a box with no CDROM, only floppy drive.

NFS seemed the obvious way to go. All goes well until just after the format/partitioning, when SuSE declares it can't mount /dev/hdax on /mnt/.

So now comes the fun of trying it with FTP, various boot disks off the internet, etc. FTP won't work because it can't load the modules into the ramdisk.

After several install attempts, I installed Debian instead - Thanks for all the help with that Mark. I guess I'm pretty stubborn, because I gave SuSE another try this evening.

No go, again.

However, after some ice-cream and telly, I was reading this and had a curious thought about modules4. The install never asks me for it. But the default fs it's going to try to install is reiser...

So I try again. I re-dded the disks from the DVD, changed the fs to ext3 and bam! We're installing off the NFS and I'm slapping my head for not thinking of that earlier.

Moral of this shaggy dog story:

UPDATE: Ubuntu 4.10 on a Sony VAIO FX705

I bought this laptop about a year ago. I installed SuSE 7.3 and 8.0 in it, but could never get the sound to work.

SuSE 8.2 has installed very easily and sound works! Apart from the modem (see below), the system runs very nicely, if a little hot at times.

Sony have decided that it would be in their best interest to provide you with a soundcard/modem combo.

This means that the modem is software driven and causes all sorts of issues when you want to use sound at the same time as the modem. This actually occurs in Windows too!

If you really need to use a modem, then get an external one - don't bother with this hatchet job.

• Markus Gaugusch's VAIO site
• Linux on Laptops

Well I've finally gotten round to moving the site away from Pipex. Let's just hope that they actually cancel my account as per my request. There are no photos yet, but I'll let you know when they are done.

Venue: Odeon, Covent Garden (Japanese version)

You really can't find parking in London these days!

I drove around for 45 minutes, before parking a couple of miles away. It might have something to do with Blaine being let out of the box today.

After a quick jog, I made it to the cinema having only missed 8 minutes of the film. C had cunningly bought the tickets so we went straight in.

The animation was up to the usual Studio Ghibli standard. I loved the details that Miyazaki bothered with: Chihiro tripping when running up a hill, or little bits of herb falling from Kamaji's hand. How Chihiro kept running into walls was hilarious.

The story reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, which may have been intentional - I haven't checked. I will have to watch this again.

Well I've spent numerous hours playing with my new toy: Broadband.

It's like Christmas come early. I still giggle with delight when I see 2MB files downloading in 30 seconds.

Anyway, that's what I've wasted my past couple of days doing. I've set up a blog, tried p2p, watched some news clips.

Thank goodness I'm not getting wireless until next week.

Well I've started this blog. It makes much more sense to keep a website up to date this way!