I Eat Rainbows

This is the last thing I have time to do now. Yet, here it is: another blog post!

I My parents just bought me an old Dell Latitude C600, off eBay, for schoolwork. The eBay listing is still up, so you can have a look at the specs here.

Awesome things about it include the general laptop-y-ness of it, a trackpoint, and a good tactile-feedback keyboard. But you don’t want to read about that, do you? Stuff that sucks about it are:

• Onboard ethernet doesn’t work. It comes with an old Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card — that has these weird ports that are really long and flat, without an adapter to be found for love or for money. To be fair, this is my fault for not reading the listing carefully enough and assuming that it would come with onboard ethernet.
• Since there are no usable networking networking capabilities, and since my parents don’t seem to want to get even an old PCMCIA standard ethernet card, I cannot connect even to the local network. This makes checking out my school svn repo for laptop use, which I always figured I was going to do, very clunky (I have to check it out to my iPod, transfer it to the laptop, do edits, then transfer the changed set back to the ipod, then check in. Yeah.)
  I also have practically no way to easily install software from the net on it (Ubuntu was horrible as it’s repository lists somehow didn’t sync properly; I’m hoping yumdownloader on Fedora Core will not have this problem), so I have to get a distro that comes on multiple CDs and hopefully contains most of what I want on those CDs.
• … but the CD drive is flaky. It will intermittently work and not work. It seems to not work after a period of heavy use — which makes installing any distro that comes with multiple CDs well nigh impossible. As of writing, I have installed, in quick succession, Ubuntu, Slackware, and half of Fedora. This, of course, wiped the Slackware partition, and the CD drive is acting up again, so I have a nice paperweight on my hands. Again, to be fair, the seller has responded very graciously to this, and a replacement drive is on it’s way as I write this.

So. in short, I’m having a very hard time. This rant made me feel slightly better.

Ah well. I better get back to that utterly boring “Deflection of a cantilever” prac writeup. I’ll have another blog post up Real Soon Now™. Yeah.

[Update] The new CD Drive has arrived. Unfortunately, it is physically broken, which makes it do a little *click-click* noise when I try to boot up Fedora Disc 1. This is not good.
I am currently debating whether to stick with this thing, or send the whole thing back. Of course, that would mean we’d have to pay for shipping. To the seller’s credit, he’s been very nice and helpful, and absolutely doesn’t care about the formatting of the hard drive, and is perfectly willing to send us another drive, if need be.

And of course, all this while, the laptop goes unused, and I’m forced to waste large swathes of time at school.

[Update] The new new CD drive arrived 23-Apr, and has been working perfectly. So has the PCMCIA wired ethernet card we bought; so school time is not wasted anymore! Battery life’s a bit low, but we have power points.

The laptop in general has been working perfectly for what I’m using it for, and life in general, at least when it comes to electronics, is simply peachy.