Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Mobile broadband in Ubuntu Jaunty

Writing using mobile broadband in the archipelago outside Stockholm...

Getting the broadband dongle from 3 to work, I braced myself for an afternoon of twiddling around. To my surprise it actually worked directly out of the box. Well, almost. The dongle wasn't recognized directly when inserted, but had to be manually added in the Network Manager. This was really easy; I just selected "3 (Bredband)" in the wizard, and typed in the PIN code when asked to. After that, everything worked. (Not too good bandwidth though, but I can live with that.)

This actually makes it even easier to use from Linux than from Windows, where you need to install a special client application, manually start the client application, enter the PIN, and connect to the network.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Broken sector

I seem to have bad karma when it comes to harddrives. The upside is that I've become very paranoid about having proper backups on all my data. Last week, just before leaving town for a week, my primary harddrive on my new computer started getting bad sectors. Running chkdsk seems to have fixed the problem, though. But I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong. I've got a stack of three harddrives standing on my desk in various stages of brokenness.