21 Jan 2004 ds   » (Master)

My poor car -- the alternator is broken, so if I want to drive anywhere, I have to fully charge the battery and drive really fast before the battery runs out. It's not too bad during the day, but racing around at night with the headlights operating on 9 volts (and decreasing) brings new meaning to "fun". Being inherintly lazy, and only driving my car about twice a month, I'm sure I will procrastinate buying an alternator for another few weeks.

The car comes up, because I used it this weekend to go to the neighborhood BestBuy and purchase a new laptop, an eMachines M5312. Except the ethernet tranceiver didn't work, so I had to return it. I drove to a different store to return it, since the first sold me the last in stock. And then drove to a third, because the second sold their last about 10 minutes before I got there. The car survived.

I, however, was very hungry and went to get a burrito before wiping Windows XP Home Edition.

Being a long-time Debian fan and developer, I decided to test out the new sarge installer. I was very impressed. It was essentially bug free, only confusing in a few places, and installed lots of stuff without any problems.

Well, there was one problem, but nothing that is debian-installer fault -- I needed to install XFree-4.3 to get X working.

What is bothering me currently, though, is that the installer didn't really attempt to get any of my other hardwhere working (or tell me that it couldn't get it working). I have USB, Firewire, wireless, ACPI, and sound that were all left unsupported and the relevant packages uninstalled. I'm now piecing together what exactly is necessary to get these working -- at least for wireless, I can apparently use the NDIS driver and driverloader.

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