MEETING: Wednesday, November 17, 2004.

The Installfest brought out five "clients" three of whom left as Happy Campers thanks to the lead gurus, Don Altman, Joe Bruno, John Moore, Ed Weinberg and a few other helpers and kibitzers. The other two encountered problems that they knew how to handle when they left. Their issues are instructive:

The first was a rather old machine with a virginal 120 GB drive. His guru, not realizing the age of the BIOS, advised him to install Windows XP on a 10 GB partition at the front of his drive and SuSE 9.1 Linux in a 15 GB partition after it. Partitioning with Partition Magic 8.0 did the job, and Windows XP installed smoothly (NOTE: although there are ways around it, it is advisable to install XP BEFORE Linux, since Windows wipes out Linux's Multiboot record, either Grub or Lilo). Then SuSE refused to install above the 10 GB XP partition. Ed Weinberg advised putting a 100 MB Linux partition ahead of the XP partition and installing the Linux kernel in the 100 MB partition, with the data files in the large Linux parition, but Partition Magic couldn't handle the moving and resizing. The solution was to wipe the drive and re-partition as indicated.

The second problem was an IBM Thhinkpad with SuSE 9.1 installed, but it's D-Link PCMCIA Wireless card could not be configured. The fact that SuSE's YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) recognized the card, but couldn't configure it. John Moore explained that YAST was smart enough to read the ID of the card, but the distribution CD's did not have a driver for it. How to get it, with no wireless access? Fortunately the card works with Windows on the same macnine, so the answer was to use Google to find the correct module (that should be searched for by the name YAST found, which is not necessarily D-Link's name and model number). Then, unforunately, the kernel must be re-compiled with the new module. An easier solution is to find a PCMCIA wireless card for which SuSE 9.1 has a driver.

For directions to the school click on the map above. For other news, check out the WPCUG site at:

www.wpcug.org
Webmasters: Campbell/Moody Software alicamp@optonline.net
Web Hosting courtesy of Ed Weinberg edw@q5comm.com>