[NCLUG] laptop wireless, anyone got a USB 802.11b adapter?

[hugh at mahon.cwx.net]

> Wait a minute. You have an HP mini-note? One of these
> http://h40059.www4.hp.com/hp2133/? Cool. What do you think of it? I'm
> confused though. I thought the mini-note came with wifi working out of the
> box. I also thought there wasn't any way to boot a USB drive in order to
> install a different OS. They come with Suse, right? Any got Fedora
> installed? Can you provide any info on what/how you did that?

The Mini-Note came with Suse installed.  I like having compilers and 
other tools on my system so as soon as I booted the system went looking 
for how to install stuff.  I spent quite a while fiddling with YaST and 
searching Web sites to figure out how to and where I could install 
stuff from.  YaST wasn't very cooperative.  In the process I installed 
RPMs which messed up X.  I thought I had made a backup but it was 
corrupt.

By going into the system setup you can have the system display a boot 
menu of the available media from which to choose, including bootable 
USB devices.  I now have that menu display every time.

There's a nice tool for Fedora that converts Fedora live CDs to USB 
flash drives so I set up a USB and booted from it.  Once it booted I 
saw an icon labelled "Install", and since I new I had a partially 
functional system at that point (largely my fault) I thought "what the 
heck" and installed Fedora 8.  Note that I have also tried Ubuntu 7.10 
and 8.04 as well as Fedora 9.  These other releases use a different 
driver for the display and I have had trouble getting things to work 
properly so I am still using Fedora 8 (which uses the vesa driver).  
Looking around the Web I've found pages where people report they're 
running Ubuntu on their Mini-Notes so, like my experience with Fedora 
and wireless, it can be made to work, probably with less effort that I 
went through. 

You can also get USB DVD drives and can boot from that so you don't 
have to build a special USB flash drive unless you want to. 

The Mini-Note is a very nice machine.  The aluminum case is pretty.  It 
does get quite warm after running for a while (like 2 hours building a 
new kernel :-).  It's not as fast as other notebooks but for me the 
performance is good enough and the smaller and lighter form factor are 
appealing.  

I didn't get to trying the wireless while playing with Suse but did 
note that the WiFi LED was red, not blue.  Some reports I have read on 
blogs are that people had trouble with WiFi under Suse.  I suppose 
mileage varies.

> Thanks.
> ----
> Jim (Ubuntu geek extraordinaire)
> ----

Thanks,

Hugh