Mandriva 2008 experience (day 3)

Oct 25

ErinFLOSS No Comments

Day 3.

Starting up the laptop again to try my luck in getting wireless and wired connections working side by side. My laptop is now a permanent resident of the living room that it is so sad. 🙁

Every sign still point to the same effects: no wireless connection, missing wlan0 device during startup, lots of errors about a thousand things during shutdown but I guess I can skip them for now.

I tried reading materials on the web specifically on the Arch Linux site as I like the way information are posted there. I can’t find any stuff that seems applicable to what I am experiencing. I tried restarting a couple of times but I am still stuck. And twice the shutdown got stuck literally.

I tried shutting down eth0 again and the keyboard input went nuts again and stopped responding. I tried rebooting using the touchpad and was able to get out of X then everything went blank. I am missing my toothpick today so I just took a pen and did a hard reset.

Next step I did was to uninstall mandi which I read does the hotplugging of network devices. I am not sure of the impact but I am getting desperate and I want to isolate where the problem really is. Bye-bye mandi service which took out two other mandi package which I am assuming is for the ethernet and wireless connections. The Windows habit kicks in and I rebooted to make sure all changes are in.

After the reboot (and the message that wlan is missing), I am back into KDE. I tried reconfiguring the Wireless connection, and it was able to connect and get an IP address. I was already smiling then I made the unthinkable: the Yes option was selected in the screen asking if I want the connection to start at boot. That effectively killed the wireless connection.

I tried bringing down eth0 to test the effect of gutting the mandi service out and then I lost my keyboard input again. Ballpoint pen to the rescue, and now I am typing this in Windows in a wireless connection.

From what I can see right now I have two options:

  1. Post this problem in the Mandriva Users Board and wait two days for some suggestion on how to fix this problem, or
  2. Reinstall another distribution. I already have finished downloading the latest Arch release and have it burned into a CD.

Hmmn, one is for patience and the other is for another adventure. I think I will go for the first option first and see if I can learn something new in return.

Since this might be the end of this series, at least MDV2008 gave me something good that I haven’t experienced before: the scroll button on the touchpad works out of the box. Even Windows can’t make that work. 🙂

ciao!