Monday, November 30, 2009

New modem

Replaced my old Qwest ActionTEC modem with a newer model that supports "Wireless-N". Installation was a bit of a bear, but only because I'm not familiar with the process. Getting wireless to work is actually much easier (heh) than it was 5 years ago, because the "quick start" details are now in the modem and not in the operating system. Convenience like that will confuse a pessimist, let me tell you... (Hint: Don't use your old Firefox bookmark for your previous modem's Setup page, do as your ISP tells you!)

The new modem means I no longer have to use WEP (Wimpy Excuse for Privacy), because WPA2 is the pre-installed default and that means vastly superior open air encryption, protection and security. Plus, works like a charm with our laptops, a Dell Inspiron 1525 and a System76 Lemur Ultrathin, both running Ubuntu Linux (one Jaunty, one Karmic).

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, I think you might be the first person to have posted about owning a Lemur Ultrathin. Feel like posting some photos/a review of it? ;-)

12:19 AM  
Blogger Grikdog said...

Naw, System76 has some nice photos which are actually representative of Lemu ;-) Do I like it? My daughter, who is 16, loves it. I'm a little annoyed by some features that I'm not familiar with, and which seem to be Karmic Koala, not the hardware. GRUB is different. Wireless-N is REQUIRED for the Lemur -- my daughter's wireless would not work with the old ActionTec we had (at least 5 years old), although it fired up ok at the local public library. They have a T1 line coming into their servers, so the speed may be have been an illusion. The Lemur does seem to be faster than my Dell Inspiron, though.

What gripes me some is the network identification -- the system does not assume localhost, but "user@user-laptop" and for some reason this has meant that the authorization dialog will NOT come up, which freezes out Update Manager! The workaround is to use terminal and sudo (which pauses for a few seconds before telling you that sudo cannot find host user@user-laptop, then continues as though nothing is the matter).

Needless to say, terminal and sudo are not in my kid's repertoire, although YouTube and Gimp are.

1:56 AM  
Blogger Grikdog said...

The authorization dialog fix is at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=723361. Thank you, Ubuntu Forums!

11:44 AM  

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