Re: [Gnewsense-dev] New installation issues

[George Roberge]

Hey, thank you very much for the encouraging reply.  I did actually grab the gNewSense disc again to do more experimenting.  Unfortunately, this situation has gone beyond comical.

The bottom line is that I have absolutely no network on the laptop.  Trisquel loaded up the atl1c driver (and iwlwifi, which I thought was non-free but may have been cleaned up) when I tested that OS out, so when the gNewSense installer told me that I had no Ethernet card I selected that atl1c from the list...unsuccessfully.  I dropped to a command line and tried to modprobe it (which may not have been right, but I'm still in training), but no luck.  Wouldn't you know that there was an issue reported with that module in one of the 2.6 kernels, which I will assume is the one I have.

So then, I'm here with zero network, a broken (?) network driver, and two useless USB wifi firmware files on a stick that I can't use.  If I had the partridge in a pear tree I'd be all set!

...and I can't access the site from a phone, tablet, or three different PCs.  I don't know why.

That's about the end of my day.  Thank you again for your reply!

George R.

-------- Original message --------
From Harry Prevor <address@hidden> 
Date: 03/27/2014  19:18  (GMT-05:00) 
To address@hidden 
Subject Re: [Gnewsense-dev] New installation issues 
 

Thanks for trying out gNewSense George.

On 2014-03-26 20:40, George Roberge wrote:
> I did install gNewSense on my laptop and a spare PC this evening 
> because
> I wanted to get a feel for the distribution, and I found that Evolution
> would not function properly unless I stopped Gnome's Network Manager.
> This is not really the point of this email, but related.

This is odd. I would file a bug if this hasn't been already reported.

> I purchased a Think Penguin USB network adapter to help break out of 
> the
> proprietary hardware bind, and used it well-enough in Mint Debian.  As 
> a
> side note- turning off the wifi using the keyboard button disabled both
> the internal wifi and the USB adapter, which was disappointing, but
> that's not important, either.  What became problematic was when I
> installed gNewSense on the laptop, and had neither a recognized eth0
> card (Intel, I guess), nor a working USB adapter.  I want to say that
> the USB adapter requires a newer kernel than the one in gNewSense.

You can upgrade the gNewSense kernel (and I recommend that you tell 
others about this too) by using jxself's repositories[1]. Simply follow 
the directions on that page and you should find your hardware working.

> I'm a pretty patient person, but as the night went on I lost most of 
> it,
> and am a little concerned about trying to promote the software if I
> can't run it.  No offense to anyone here, but if I'm a "tech dork" and
> have had this many issues, I'm afraid of what Joe Windows will face if
> he brings home the distribution DVD.

I understand how you feel -- The fact is, operating systems are often 
hard to get working correctly. Please don't leave us; sometimes you just 
have to grind out through all the issues out before you get comfortable. 
All of the issues you've described in this email are indeed fixable; 
it's just a matter of getting the work done.

[1]: http://jxself.org/linux-libre/

Glad to have a new gNSer,

-- 
Harry Prevor

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