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I haven’t blogged for a couple of days, I’ve been kinda busy.
A couple of weeks ago, as you may remember, I built a new machine for someone for pretty much the cost of parts only. I didn’t mind doing it and the bonus was I got the old components, the upshot being it gave me enough parts to assemble a new machine.
This machine is now my linux box, something I have been wanting to play around with for a while.
My first attempt at using linux was a couple of years ago when I installed Mandrake as a dual boot OS on my Win98 machine.[?]
It was a dismal failure.
Not because the OS was unusable, but because the modem in the machine is a winmodem and as hard as I looked, I could not find a linux driver for it.
Modems are so cheap these days because part of the modem function is emulated by software. The downside of this is they become OS dependant. As I couldn’t use the modem under linux, I lost motivation to use it.
I don’t have that problem now that I am on ADSL. The internet connection is managed by a router and my computers connect to it over a LAN.
The proof was when I fired up the machine with a fresh distro[?] of Mandrake and connected to the internet with no problems at all.
So why it doesn’t do it now is beyond me! The hub light on the router shows the machine as connected, but the machine doesn’t respond to pings, and none of the other machines will ping from the linux box. The IP[?] addresses are all correct so it really has me stumped.
On the upside, problems like this usually help with the learning curve, who knows, given time I might not be such a newb.
