100% Working Linspire on HP Laptop

I've finally gotten rid of the gremlins in my Wifi Setup. Seems I just had a issue with the KDE network telling me I was on chan 6 and then iwconfig told me I was actually on chan 11. I put the system on auto in the KDE network panel and now things are working. I'll re-encrypt the connection sometime tomorrow and see if it continues to work.

My only wishlist item here is the ability to pick up on other wireless networks if they're available in case I was at a airport or starbucks.

Next month I'll become an insider and begin to see what I can do to help out the next version of Linspire. I've put forward several items in the forums to improve CNR and hope to see those ideas put into the system someday. I'd also like to see Linspire work with Lycoris on their AI Squared product. I think if would help alleviate the problem with installing software on a system and get it working. However after all the glowing promise Lycoris said about the product they then turn back on everyone with "It only works for DesktopLX and we do not plan to expand the platforms it runs on." I understand the need to make a buck but this is something that would speed adoption of Linux across the board. Even Lycoris could reap rewards from more users using Linux.

End to Wireless Woes

I spent hell getting my 54g card going under Linspire today. I suspect it all had to do with a bogus .inf file in the HP drivers I've had lately. I vaugely remember a 20k inf file about a year ago when I first tried Linuxant's drivers.. then the .inf file blew up to nearly the size of the .sys file that the system also needs. We'll I found a driver on emachines site that had the older 20k .inf file and ndiswrapper appears to be working. And I suspect that Linuxant's driverloader will also work with the smaller .inf file as well.

If speed is not a issue I'd seriously suggest getting a Orinoco Gold pcmica card from ebay.. they go for as low as 20 dollars and work just fine in any Linux distro with the least hassle.

Software Suspend in a Unlikely Place

I've been working to get Linux working 100% on my laptop for ages. It's HP Ze4430us which is only about year old. Even with 2.6.x I was unable to get software suspend (Saving machine state to disk) which many Linux laptop users bemoan the lack of and are forced to wait through long boot times for many distros.

We'll I loaded my Distro of choice (Linspire) onto the laptop. I did not expect the desktop edition (Linspire has a Laptop Edition) to have any special laptop features already loaded. We'll it did and when the battery meter loaded up I saw a option to suspend. Since it was a fresh install and I was not really worried of screwing up anything I told it to suspend. We'll it did. And better yet it completely booted back up when I hit the power button. Mouse was a little confused but after turning it on and off with the button on the keyboard it worked fine.. so it's not really a big issue. They pulled this off on a 2.4.24 kernel which is also a big surprise.

So I can honestly say everything I want working on my laptop is working great. I'm still having a 54g issue and my trusted Linuxant drivers are not behaving but I'm confident I will have that issue fixed sometime today when I get time to see why it's not working.