wifi on Dell Inspiron 1318

Finally, I was able to get the wifi to work on my Inspiron 1318.  The trick was that the lspci for some reason showed me the wrong broadcom version.  It was showing 4312 while it really is bcm4310.  The difference is the fact that I need different drivers to make it work with ndiswrapper.  it works fine with b43fwcutter and bcmwl5 as the driver.  If you follow the instructions and install the driver found in Vista as in my case it won't work.  It will try to install the bcmwl6.inf that is what is installed under vista.  I installed the bcmwl5 and it works fine.  Actually I am writing this over my wif link.. finally. If you need help geting your wifi on the Dell Inspiron 1318 to work under Open SuSe let me know, and I will post links to the sites that I got my information from.. A link for OpenSuSe Users. More Info Thanks rbkumaran

Linux on Dell Inspiron 1318.

About a month ago, I finally got myself a Dell laptop. it's the Inspiron 1318. I wanted to get an Apple macbook, but realized the reason I loved my PowerBook G4 was the fact that it wasn't running windows. I know, that's a lame excuse. But honestly this Inspiron is a perfect match for my needs, I don't like bulky 15.4" laptops. I was a little tired of the tiny 12.1" I had, my work laptop is a 14.4" which is perfect, but I couldn't find a good 14.4" laptop. So I came across the Dell Inspiron.1318. It costs just $1000 less than a macbook, which is a little faster etc. but couldn't justify paying that much more. First thing after booting into windows Vista and getting all the HW info, was to install Open SuSe 11.0 Linux OS. So the drive is 250 GB, I left like 60GB for Vista, just in case, my dSLR requires it's windows software to updates it's bios :-( maybe one day they will make it platform independent. This is my journey with the Dell Inspiron and Linux.. My First OS insalltion went smooth. I ran into three major problems. 1. WiFi card not working 2. Sound not loud, but working 3. HD parking/unparking it self rather too often.. Read after it, and here you can read some more.. Other than those issues all working like a charm. Until today, I did not have the time, to work on things to make my laptop work smoothly, I will keep updating with latest information.

Re-visited running linux on my work Laptop

Well, it was dual boot from the start, Open SuSe 10.0 and Windows XP Professional but after a dell motherboard flash update, umm grub was overwritten. Well let me tell you why. In todays world who uses Floppy drives? you know those little black square things that can hold about 1.44 MB. Back in the day those were used for flashing your motherboard, not today. Dell figures, why not play with the MBR for a mother board uprade. It's probably in the fine print but honestly who reads those. So here is the lesson...

VOIP

Ok, now with the outage of skype, I started looking at other options? Gizmo? since it works on the three systems. But how many people that are on my skype list are willing to switch or will want to switch? no idea, we will find out. So far both are installed on my system skpe, and gizmo, soon to test and find out..

What do we really use the computers for?

Well, I am actually writing this from my work laptop which happens to be a windows computer, with a dual boot Open SuSe 10.2  Though I could not get the SuSe to work with my wireless router at home.  It works fine at work.  But really those days what do we need computers for? Office suite?  Open office is an alternative.  Not perfect but it's getting better every day.  E-mailing, well even if you don't have a full fledged e-mail client, you can probably reach your work email through the web interface of either lotus notes or MS exchange.  So really buying todays computers which come with loads of ram, and a super duper twin core crunching CPU's are for Visa.  Is it worth it?  do we use that power really.  Or is it just a waist of money for the hardware, not to mention that most come with the Vista Home Basic, which is probably worse than an XP Home? not sure really, but I don't even care to tell you the truth.   Because I will probably not install Visa.  I will have to learn it sooner or later but for the time being, I am happy with Ubuntu/Open SuSe, and XP at work.. This is todays ramblings......

A simple little hurdle

So today someone tells me, hey go to the Ikea website, check it out you can design your room. Fill it with furniture, and all. What's the catch? it's a windows only program. Well I kind if understand Ikea's position, do we want the 5% of computer users using Linux, or the 90% using windows? hmmm, business decision, not a hard one now is it?

First page

finally started using this thing. I just updated/created my first page.. Hope it is interesting... Chek it out here and here