Wow, never would I have thought that installing drivers for an unassuming bit of obscure hardware would be so difficult. Until it happened to me, at least.
I’ve been meaning to dual boot Xubuntu/Windows ME (of course, after undergoing a major operation courtesy of 98lite - it’s too big a piece of crap otherwise) on one of the old PC’s I have lying about, and, for the most part, I got this set-up working the way I wanted. Except, there was this teeny problem of Xubuntu not immediately detecting and configuring my Lucent Orinoco USB Client, a wireless B adaptor which is relatively ageing, not to mention obscure.
I figured it wouldn’t be so much of a problem - I used to run SuSe on that PC and have always managed to install precompiled binaries from here. Unfortunately, the kind fellow does not update the binaries for newer kernal revisions anymore - I gather he has replaced his own Orinoco card. Anyway, I don’t really take to RPM-based distros, and I figured an Ubuntu derivative would allow me to install such drivers via apt-get. Easy.
Or so I thought. It turns out that I in fact need to install the drivers by manually compiling and subsequently invoking it at startup by loading it into the kernel via modprobe and adding it to /etc/modules (this is the clearest set of instructions I’ve seen so far). Again, this wasn’t too difficult - but required Internet access to install the prerequisite software packages needed for the compiling and such. I carried the computer across the room within (cables’) reach of the wired network router in the hopes of plugging it in temporarily, getting the drivers done and putting it back to its original position, isolated from the wired haven and totally reliant on wireless Internet. That was when I realized I had taken the ethernet card out of that particular machine and had grafted it to another one. And so, frustrated, I placed the PC back in its spot, and, until today, there it had been languishing with only Windows ME providing Internet access - sufficient, as I don’t use it often at all, but nevertheless still irksome, as I had not accomplished this simple task.
Well, I finally bought a ethernet card today (spent the better part of half an hour in Sim Lim Square scouting for the cheapest one, and eventually paid $9 - not bad) - and as per the aforementioned instructions, proceeded to compile the driver. Here I hit a (sorta expected) snag - the drivers weren’t compiling correctly. Specifically, I had the exact same problem as the first commentor to this blog post. But this proved to be an easy obstacle to overcome. I fired up nano and merely deleted the offending line, along with the lines immediately adjacent that were directly related (it was an if, else bit of code) - I had deduced that those lines weren’t very important, in any case. I attempted the same steps again, and this time it worked like a charm. The sight of the green LED finally blinking after a reboot elicted, I have to admit, a burgeoning sense of accomplishment. Yeah, let me revel in my (small) victories.
Today’s a good day.
In other geeky news, wobblin’ is currently undergoing a slowly-paced overhaul. Hence the broken links, etc. I promise it will be a hundred percent up and running (and improved) soon, and by soon I mean when we get off our lazy asses, and, of course, by that I mean never. Just kidding, it shouldn’t take too long. I hope. In the meantime you can torture youself by looking at the archive of all out previous posts here. (Yes, I merely moved the blog to a subdirectory. Told you; lazy.)
