San Francisco Nomad

I’m not a Linux wizard, but I just helped a friend install Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 on her HP Mini 5101 and tried to get things working for her. My experience was pretty similar to mine installing it on my HP Mini 2140, only with some additional problems. Here are the problems I know about and ran into. Not all are fixed yet, but I’ll give some pointers on how to fix them in case it helps anyone.

Dual-core support will make your system more or less unbootable

It might not happen on every boot, but it will happen on some.  The non-booting is pretty much as described here and here .  You can either disable the dual-core in your BIOS setup screen or install kernel 2.6.29-02062904-generic from kernel-ppa as detailed in the second link.

WiFi doesn’t work out of the box

I found a set of drivers on the Broadcom site which work.  They don’t seem to load automatically, which is probably because I don’t know the fascinating intricacies of Linux booting and driver loading architecture which I’ve just been dying to know in order to get my computer working so I can browse the Internet.  What I did to get them working is 1) Download the 32-bit drivers, the README.txt and the 2.6.29 kernel patch.  Extract stuff.  Apply the kernel patch to the drivers as detailed in its readme (though it seemed to have some errors and didn’t patch everything I thought it should).  Then follow the readme for installing the drivers with the exception of any deviations in the patch readme.

Every time you want to bring your card up and get it working you seem to have to type something like the lines below.  Reboot?  Type these lines.  Come out of sleep mode?  Type these lines.  I’m sure they would go in some init.something-or-other file.  I stuck them in a shell script to make it faster than typing them.  Maybe I’ll just hang out on the street corner with a case of Jolt Cola and an AD&D rulebook in hopes of tricking some nerd to come make them work automatically for me.  If all goes as expected, he’ll regale me with tales of Linux’s clearly superior ease of use while he types many lines of tersely abbreviated commands and rearranges things in that completely obvious way that the entire population (and especially his grandma) should be acquainted with.  Oh yeah, the lines I’m using to start the damn network adaptor follow (got a little involved in my rant there):

sudo modprobe lib80211
sudo insmod wl.ko

Ok . . . update . . . after messing with things and looking at about 20 different terse and partial code snippets online here is how I got it to load automatically.

1. Copied the .ko file to my kernel drivers folder.
   sudo cp ~/hybrid_wl/wl.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net
2. Update module dependencies or some such update.
   sudo depmod -Ae
3. Edit the /etc/modules file
   sudo pico /etc/modules
4. In the editor add the following two lines to the end of the file:
   lib80211
wl
5. After adding, press CTRL-O to write the file out (press enter to accept same file name).
6. Press CTRL-X to exit the editor.
7. Reboot the computer and make sure the wireless network works without having to manually load the drivers.

Sound doesn’t work at all

I have no idea why.  I suspect it’s possibly the same problem as with many other netbooks.  That will be a good time when I get to try fixing that problem.  I can hardly wait since I’d really rather spend half my life trying to fix driver problems rather than using a computer (or any other tool) to accomplish anything.  Oh joy.

Other fixes I feel are likely in my future

The detection of the lid close doesn’t work.  Maybe a link such as this one will give me many more hours of joy trying to sort out conflicting advice and I can perhaps try about 10 different things before I find something that works.  You know, that’s what I’m hoping for.

I suspect that the web cam and the microphone may not be working either.  I’m really hoping for some large chunks of quality time with this computer next weekend.  There is nothing sexier than typing sweet arcane commands to a computer while sitting in my underwear and hoping one set of commands or another will seduce it into the base level of functionality that makes use of the hardware I paid for.

I saw this blog post by Melinda about Yahoo! personals and it seems Match.com works the same way.  Though I don’t know Melinda, I have to agree with her assessment that the Yahoo! personals contact “system” is pretty much dishonest and scummy. I also ran across this blog post which seems to indicate that Y! personals is going down. I can understand why.

I don’t know what used-car salesman thought up this system, but perhaps it’s time Yahoo! rethought it because it’s simply going to drive people away from them since their selection is dwindling and their restrictions and fees are high.  I know 99.9% for sure that I’ll be canceling my subscription just before my subscription runs out and my credit card gets charged again.  I hear sometimes they like to charge credit cards anyway, even after they cancel.  I’ll be on the lookout for that other little scummy trick of theirs.  Be warned, Yahoo!, don’t try it because I’m not stupid and I can defend myself.

So after that rant, let me explain the problem.

1. First you pay a fee from about $15-$30 to use their personals site per month.  Yeah, I can waste that kind of money on a dinner or something, but this service costs Yahoo! almost nothing.  I mean you can get magazine subscriptions for a year for the same price as a month of Y! personals, so it’s not really nearly cheap enough when you think about how they don’t supply much content except for some articles with dating tips and some very low transaction cost page loads and database hits.
   
2. WTF, I’m seeing advertising on my personals page? I’m paying $15-$30 a month to be advertised to? Yahoo!  You’re really douche bags of the highest order.  I don’t see advertisements on Flickr (which you also own) and I only pay $24.95 a year for that with much higher costs on your end. Maybe get someone from Flickr to help you pull your heads out, huh?  Oh, I forgot no one from Flickr would ever bother because Personals is a warmed over, stale, POS property for you–even if you’re making money because there are suckers born every minute.
   
3. So you say it’s about the network of quality people? Pffft.  Your network of quality personals is shrinking all the time.  You’re losing market share hand over fist and have fewer subscribers than 5-10 years ago.  Also a huge majority of people that are shown on the site are non-paid subscribers which means they can’t send anyone a real message or reply unless they pony up way more money than your pathetic service is worth.  I wouldn’t blame them for not paying up.  No one likes feeling like a sucker or having their emotions transparently played on in order to give some stale, manipulative company a free ride.   There are ice-breakers (which are a little sentence you can send for free) like “You caught my eye,” but they’re pretty much useless except as a tool you’re using to try and get everyone to pay your fees.
   

So basically, what do you actually offer that’s of any value compared to all the other sites out there?

1. You vet pictures and profiles before you let them go live so that it’s not only just a sex meat market.  This is nice, but other sites achieve the same goal better and more inexpensively.
   
2. You make people pay what is a rather high fee to use the service.  This keeps some scammers and people who aren’t that serious out.  On the other hand it also keeps out anyone who has a clue that your site isn’t all that great of a value and that they’re being overcharged and manipulated by you.
   
3. You have a large pool of people . . . though other sites probably have larger pools.  On the other hand,  someone who has paid their money can’t really communicate back and forth freely with whoever they choose.  Your supposedly large pool is full of people who can’t talk back to you.  There are a lot of inactive and unpaid people who can’t talk to you even if the other person has paid the fee.  The double-activation (as Melinda mentions) is just douchey.
   

I know you want people to pay, but manipulating them is evil.  Too bad Google, whose unofficial motto is “don’t be evil” doesn’t do personals.  They would never be this bad (even if they are sometimes evil-ish themselves).  I’ve even seen some sites that limit the emails for non-paids to a handful a week or something, which is certainly less evil and a better compromise to get those who really use it to pay while casual or non-users don’t pay for what they don’t use.  Plus this helps keep those casual users from ruining the service for those who pay (so they don’t feel like suckers).

K.  Enjoy your upcoming irrelevance, Yahoo!