Wireless Not-work

Blogger seems to be on a go-slow tonight. It took ages to load. Coincidentally I've spent most of the day raging against the machine. Well, one machine in particular - my laptop. Now, it's not a Dell, so it doesn't catch fire, but it does seem to have extreme difficulty in remembering just where it put its wireless connection (It's about here somewhere - I'm sure I saw it just a moment ago - Oh never mind I'll just tell him I can't find the website he's looking for)

Let me explain. We don't use the evil one's operating system because it is expensive, doesn't work very well and gets every virus going. Instead up until now we have used this version of the Linux operating system. It used to be called Mandrake and was one of the better commercial distributions of Linux. Then they tied up with a company called Connectiva, changed the name to Mandriva and frankly bits that used to work don't any more. And the bits that used not to work still don't. Most glaringly, file sharing doesn't work at all. That's kind of fundamental when you are trying to share files.

So I looked around and came across SuSE which used to be a German distribution, but was bought by Novell, a big US networking company. It got rave reviews from some people (others said it sucked) but I went ahead and bought it.

And most of it is a big improvement. It installs itself pretty painlessly, detects all the bits of the computer correctly and sets them up fairly well. But this wireless network has caused no end of grief. It's working now, but due to 6 foot stone walls it loses the signal occasionally.

And when that happens it doesn't bother to try to find it again. It just sits and sulks. You have to issue arcane commands in a terminal window to get it going again. Most annoying.

Continuing the technology theme, Lorna dropped one of our two way radios into a bucket of hot soapy water while cleaning one of the bathrooms. The radio has been strangely quiet ever since.