Re: Who is your go to person for virtual disks?

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Heh.  "Toss bits all over the floor".

I'm in the process of taking an old Sager laptop with Windows XP and 
turning it into a dual boot Ubuntu machine for my son to get some hands 
on experience.  (Yes, I specifically want dual boot rather than 
virtualization, so that he gets some solid bare metal feel.)  Anyway, as 
much as I dislike Windows and as old and clunky as XP is, I find it much 
more forgiving and dare I say more intuitive than even the modern 
flavors of Ubuntu.  For example, I have an internal Wifi card that 
didn't work and an external Edimax dongle that works wonderfully on 
another machine.  Now, go find me a simple way to disable the internal 
card and enable the Edimax.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Anyway, I found answers ranging from blacklisting drivers (didn't even 
know that was a thing) to recompiling bits of the system to physically 
opening the laptop and removing the card.  None of them were universally 
successful and some of them had me spinning into dark areas of the 
Intertubes where evil things lurk.  Or at least some serious hackers.   
I learned about lshw and rfkill and modprobe and all sorts of neat things.

In any event, I finally managed to get the internal card working (we 
won't discuss the fact that the Sager has both a function key to 
enable/disable Wifi AND an external switch that is literally black on 
black with black lettering positioned in a place that is both easy to 
nudge into an "almost on" position and also nearly impossible to see) so 
I never did solve the issue - I don't know that there is an easy way to 
disable the internal card.  There seems to be yet another way via 
editing rc.local, but I'm not going down that road today.  And the moral 
of the story is that there are some things that Linux does really, 
really well and some things that it doesn't.


On 3/23/2020 10:34 AM, midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Yep:  Made that mistake more than once.  IBM I, just smiles and starts where
> it left off.  AIX/Linux toss bits all over the floor, and need to restart
> from scratch.