Semi-hosed Wind UMPC

Aug 25

ErinFLOSS, Gadget No Comments

Doc Mana (or rather his daughters) own a Wind and has pointed me to the released Linux realtek drivers. As Doc Mana has stated, the released drivers are in RPM format but this gives me a good opportunity to use the alien utility for converting packages. Doc also said his Neo empriva is working fine with a similar wireless chipset.

With the extended weekend, I promised to try it out with a refreshed Xubuntu installation, or better yet try installing the PCLinuxOS MiniMe distro to get native support for RPM. The nutshell is that I now have a semi-hosed Wind UMPC. 🙁

Here is what happened:

  • I replaced the gnome network manager with the kwlan application and I hosed down my network connections. I then decided to refresh the Xubuntu installation from the my 4GB flash disk. And then…
  • I tried converting the package using the alien utility with the “–scripts” parameter because it told me so. It said it is for including the scripts inside the package. When it was time to install them with dpkg, an error was thrown out that there is a parsing error in the post install script. Both drivers show this error. Great!
  • As this is a refreshed installation, I decided to try again the tip from the msiwind.net wiki as this is also stated in the Gentoo Wind wiki. The build essential tools refused to install properly because of the problem with the botched realtek drivers installation.
  • I cannot uninstall/purge the realtek drivers from synaptic becase there are errors in the hooked scripts. 🙁
  • I wiped by flash disk with MiniMe and proceeded to install over my Xubuntu system. Everything seems to be fine until I rebooted. The system got reconfigured with my flash disk as its main storage (sda) and my Wind’s drive as its secondary (sdc) so the GRUB entries refuses to work.
  • I tried booting with the flash disk inserted and tried to select the HDD Minime installation but the boot process refuses to proceed and ends with a kernel panic.

Right now the Wind will only continue booting if I have the flash disk inserted, and its too late into the night to start tinkering with livecd options. The bright side is that I have effectively created a very crude security key. /lol

I hope I can fix this properly tomorrow as the wife is giving me weird looks when she can’t easily get into the Windows partition to play Mystery Case Files. 😀

ciao!

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