Another win/lose day

So, I had the Thinkpad A31 out...  It's a cool computer, and I have it more as a half-wit collector's item.  In my mind, it's the the laptop I most identify with service on the International Space Station.  So, I think about zipping through space every time I see it.  Just me, I guess...

And I feel a bit dense, as I remember writing something about seeing if I could switch memory modules from the R40 into the A31...  That might be kind of hard, as the A31 uses DDR, and the R40 uses DDR3...  Anyway...

Yeah...  Anyway...  I got the A31 out, installed the IBM wireless card (I think it's actually an Orinoco rebranded), and decided to do some experimenting. This particular system came to me with Windows 2000 installed (running in 256 MB of RAM), and it doesn't like my nice, new high speed Internet connection.  It would see a signal, but I could not find a way to get it to connect properly.  The wireless card seemed to be working fine, seeing that there was a signal there, but I don't think the software wanted to admit to that.  I'm sure if I played with it long enough...  But that wasn't why I dragged the laptop out of the pile.

Well, I dumped out my ever-growing pile of liveboot disks, and made the discovery I knew I was going to:  The A31, of course, only has a CD drive.  And, of course, I'd accidentally burned AntiX onto a DVD...  Not really wanting to go through the rigamarole of correcting, I decided to try booting something else.  How's abouts Wary Puppy?  That works on everything!

Except the A31, where it gagged and locked up the system.  Looked like driver problems, though I'm not sure.

OK, next candidate, Damn Small Linux.  That, thankfully, booted perfectly.  Except...  It didn't see the wireless card.  A quick check through the system showed...  Nothing...

Curses.

So, I rebooted, and got crazy, and tried to boot up Ubuntu 10.04.  And you can probably guess how well that went.  At least the lockup was a bit neater than Wary Puppy's.......

At least I know I can get one Linux distro running on the old Thinkpad.  I may re-download the AntiX .iso and burn it to a CD this time.  (I'd just do a USB thumb drive, but I'm not sure the A31 will boot from that.  Besides, it'd be good to have it on the more accessible CD format for use as a possible rescue disk.)

Once again, you win some, and you crash and burn some.

At least my old Acer banger is rolling along with Bodhi.  That makes me happy.  The more I'm using Bodhi, the more I start to like it.  It definitely takes time to grow on you, but at least it's sort of fun to play with.

It's been very nice weather here.  I did manage to tear away from the computers and get out to walk a bit.  That's a bit of a win, too, I do believe...