Re: Acer Travelmate 512T (was: LinModems)
I've had an Acer 500T since March '99, of course I would not buy it
again just for it has the Lucent thingy inside and for I have been
waiting for such a looong time before the binary driver was released
and for it's quite annoying that it is binary only (*) and that they
are not upgrading it. (Actually as you may read [much] below, I won't
buy anything more with any Lucent stuff inside.)
But I drop this message just to say that the Acer CD coming with this
500T
----> is not but a recovery CD, it also contains the whole
installable system you also find on a "normal" win98 CD,
it just misses an appropriate startup (not the
Acer-stuck-to-the-braindead-wipe-the-hole-disk-recovery-utility one),
which is provided by any standard win98 startup floppy (of course
with the option of loading the CD-ROM driver).
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Skip all what follows if in a hurry, I talked _a_lot_. But win-also
users may want to almost read the "footprint" and wonder wheather it's
really the case of getting connected to the Internet with win, or
almost decide to keep personal docs [mail, projects, important work
being done] on a Linux partition [or if really working on win stuff,
on a second fat32 partition which can be temporarily toggled as Linux
native with fdisk before booting to win and connecting to the
Internet, Linux will still see and mount the partition as a fat32 one,
windog will not recognize it, so it's more likely hidden and
protected, unless kind of a win-dd can be run...?]. Err... somewhere
below there's also the way I use(d) to prepare my own recovery file,
look for "bzip2".)
I had complained with the Acer vendors more than once (I'm in Paris,
France), they knew nothing about it and couldn't answer but "you're
right" when I told them how frustrating I found to have a braindead
wipe-the-whole-disk recovery utility after paying for a windog98
license.
I used to keep a recovery file of my own, I used to remove the Sleep
Manager file and shut down Sleep Manager, run win's defrag, boot Linux
and mount the win partition, clean the free space dd'ing zeroes on a
file up to running out of disk space, delete the file, umount and dd
the whole partition to bzip2, and so keep a recovery file of my own:
in case of win-problems (downgrades included) I didn't really want to
re-cfdisk...
_But_ the first and only moment where I had to kill the recovery file
(I don't have a cdburner yet) was also the moment when I had a
win-disaster which win-ruined the win partition. So in order to
reinstall it I had to finish win-ruining the disk and wipe away Linux
too?
Naaaaah... I got <coff> another not-Acer win98 CD+floppy, but just told
to myself before using it "wait, let's give a look"... et voila`, see
top of message.
After installing from the Acer CD the standard-win98 way, the sound
hardware (I mean the toggles to mixer controls) appears in a slightly
different way but you know what? I works _much_better_ now, before
(and I've had occasion to say this on the sox mailing list) I had kind
of a motorboat noise in the background even with the 3-dicolous staff
off.
Now I just keep windog as poor as possible, I immediately downgrade
after testing anything... I keep an 80MB recovery bzip2 file with
basic install + some configuration done. _But_ I'm also ready to
reinstall from scratch, at any moment. The important stuff is on other
partitions. W Linux.
----------
(*)
I'm not writing what follow as especially addressed to Lucent, which
policy was very annoying to me - and to a lot of other people, I see -
but which reliability as a matter of security I can not put in doubt.
Anyway, I've really realized how only an open source system as Linux
can be trusted in matter of security. Quite recently before the
win-disaster, I had noticed a full bandwidth outgoing data flow while
connected to the Internet with windog, and it was _not_ the flush of
the outgoing e-mail messages queue (which windog may not even have,
BTW). If any at all in that session, I had sent messages much earlier
and Netscape had shown the gauge and said "done, passed to the smtp
server").
I cutted immediately, I reconnected via another ISP and the thing
restarted!!! 8-O I've something calling back!!!
Damn... What's the main possibility of a hole, apart from windog
itself (a-ehm, and... I beg everybody's pardon... and its users' one,
me included, just there on the net with our trousers down)? I'll
never forget some postings to... err... debian-user I believe :-)
'twas... "somebody is scanning my ports" or the like, then I had
thaught "sure, to see if it is a windog system, I bet it is quite an
'open' system".
And it got me after an ISP (->IP address) change! Something here must
be calling back!
Well, for a start, M$N Messenger does call home, to check if the
Hotmail-now-I-believe-M$ server has mail... Yes I confess, some months
earlier, I had stupidly installed M$N Messenger and an upgrade of M$
Netmeeting in the hope of keeping in closer touch with my brother in
Italy... windog user, but he was wiser than me and didn't install
anything of it... err... actually he was too lazy... and maybe a
little hostile for I left Italy while he was having a kid... his wife
I mean... ok I'm jocking, this is Woody Allen on debian-laptop <:-D
Ok seriously (the kid came much later), I configured M$N Messenger not
to start automatically at each connection but the thing happened
again... well the tiny icon was still there on that bar, and it was a
dialog of its own (MSN Messenger I mean) where I told "not
automatically at each connection", so it should get called anyway by
the system and answer "I don't start automatically anymore" but it may
leave some TSR...
I also had recently grabbed webstripper, an awful "freeware" which
uses kind of 20% of the bandwidth just to show you ads, while you were
hoping to grab web sites to look at them later faster (and you'll see
it crash on most of them), and which keeps reloading the same ads, the
same animated gifs, on and on and on... (With the super stuff there is
in Linux to this goal, how strongly I wished I had managed to have the
weakmodem work!!! I promised to myself that never again I'll pay
1$... or 1F... or 1L... or 1E... for anything with Lucent stuff
inside, not even... an hair dryer [hair dryer, is it called like this
in English? damn I could have picked up some other stuff].) But
webstripper didn't have the small icon there on the bar... and I
hadn't activated it in those sessions... so no TSR chance... and I
doubt that webstripper author can have replaced one of M$ DLLs...
Finally, I also had upgraded the Lucent "firmware", which is a smart
way of calling the software running on the laptop CPU for the
weakmodem lack of the UART... but I had been able to see on the
"connection status" dialog the outgoing flow, while if it was Lucent's
driver or windog itself they may have easily hidden it (but this
deduction is easily predictable).
Where was the trojan horse? When the win-disaster happened I said
"to hell, it was time for a drastical downgrade".
*BUT* a few days ago (**) I was _just_surfing_ on some web site, only
M$ Internet Explorer was running... _nothing_ else... I was steady on
a page, just reading... well you know what? The CD-ROM started
running!!! 8-/
(**) "I confess" bis, I still have to upgrade from 2.1, where I don't
have a web browser apart from Lynx (but I had Netscape on... Debian
1.3, I _have_ it still in the desktop I left in Italy... well I use to
reinstall from scratch after moving the whole installation to
temporarily allocated space and change its fstab to have it working
and reconfig the new one more or less as the ancient once apart from
improvements of course, please do not maintain upgradability for me).
I'd like to install unstable, but AFIK from debian-news
bandwidth-related problems make the CD release of unstable not to come
so soon... maybe potato r1 then.)
(Midnight, I had a lot of work to do, talked too much here [I beg
everybody's pardon for the bandwidth usage], I should also have
answered to Jim Bray, ciao Jim, talk to you soon.)
Nicola
On Thu, Sep 21, 2000 at 07:06:40PM +0200, Nils Kassube wrote:
> Andreas Tscharner wrote:
>
> > That's not the point. I don't know why I should waste a PCMCIA - Slot for a
> > modem if I already have one...
>
> Well, a PC Card works. The Lucent WinModem thingy doesn't.
> Simple.
>
> I've got an Acer TravelMate 512T, so I've got the same problem. BTW: Is
> here anyone else with the same laptop? I'd like to know if there are
> common pitfalls, e.g. relating to dual- booting Win98. I thought about
> installing Linux a year ago and remember hearing something about the
> hibernation feature in Win98 destroying a Linux partition and/or
> crashing if fips was used to shrink the Win98 one? Unfortunately
> it looks like I have to use fips, because Acer was only bundling
> a System Recovery CD not a full Win98 CD. Yes, this is my only
> Windows 9x system :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Nils
> --
> nika@acm.org
> nika@kassube.de (preferred)
> 4kassube@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
>
>
>
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>
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