f-log

Note to self, do not mock the 'power' of power cuts vs UPS.
Why? cos in revenge the local power sub system knocked out the power on half the street for 28 hours, but missed me, we were out for only 8 hours.
The UPS survived for less than 5 minutes.
The machine seems OK, but bizzarely an external USB hard drive that had been on started to give me odd errors. Switch enclosure and no more errors.
Note to self, ensure external USB HDD cables do not cause health and safety issues to said hard drives.
(as this the second time in 4 weeks I have sent a external drive flying, minor injuries to myself).
Note everyone, make sure you backup your backups ...

I have a ancient laptop (p75 16mb) that has been gathering dust for many years.
It has a special place in my heart as the fist machine I ever installed linux on.
Boy that was fun. I had to create boot floppies and PCMCIA driver disks to enable a PCMCIA CDROM drive to allow me to install Debian.
I remember trying it a few years ago and failing the password test, but it recently resurfaced so I endeavored to recover the password one way or another.Linux single still wanted to the password, I had tried most things then I noticed scrawled on laptop 'root', I had tried "root" and it was not the password, but this scrawl was somewhat smudged, i tried 'r00t' and ... I was in.
uname -arevealed an early kernel, 2.2.18pre21 that last access date was 2004.
This machine had been running enlightenment (in place of a very slow window 95) but what was on it now ...startx
Command not found :(
A whiz through the users command history showed a lot of c coding going on in 1999 and a bizzare 'box' described in a folder called 'ideas'
maybe some systems are better left alone ...

Power cuts:0 UPS:2
Hate power-cuts, love UPSs
bacon.saved=true;

although my main machine is gentoo I do run a 10yr old laptop on Ubuntu, this is a throw away system that gets very little use.
I use Ubuntu because of the lack of tweaking and fiddling it requires, this certainly loses something in comparison to gentoo but it means I can be pretty sure th laptop will work when I need it.
So I was a bit put-out when after upgrading to Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope my wifi stopped working...
The PCMCIA card was detected an interface was created and all the iwconfig commands and settings appeared to work it just would never associate with my access point.
A quick google showed I was not alone but a deeper examination of those same results showed that the users with the most problems had a slightly different Atheros wifi chip set 242, of which there seems to be more solutions that [reference something that contains a lot of other items].
After reading all about the 242 solutions (not realizing they were not relevant) I did start to see some trends and as such was able to concoct my own solutions.rmmod ath5k
modprobe ath_pcithis changes the interface from wlan0 back to ath0