Pete Zaitcev asked for a screen shot. Here are two.
This is the screen where it hangs up for several minutes before going into install mode.
And this one is the cryptic message that I get. I have no idea what it’s looking for here.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
One Less Thing To Worry About?
Is the Yellowstone caldera fizzling out?
This adds to suggestions that the plume has disconnected from its heat source in the Earth’s core. If this is true, it means the plume could be dying – and that the sequence of mega-eruptions could come to an end. “If it doesn’t have clear source, as it rises eventually the plume will die out,” says Schutt.
Let’s hope so. A Yellowstone explosion could be a civilization-ending event, and there’s not much we can do to prevent it, at least with current technology.
Curing Diabetes
…with lettuce? If this is true, it seems like a pretty big breakthrough.
New Fedora Laptop Issue
OK, when we last left our intrepid laptop, it couldn’t install Fedora. Following advice in comments there, I tried a live version of Ubuntu, and it had no problem, other than telling me that it didn’t have an open-source driver for the WLAN. Then I tried Fedora again. It hung up as it did before, but I went away and ignored it, and when I came back after a while, it had finally booted into the installer. Apparently I just hadn’t been patient enough the last time.
Now, after selecting languages, it gives me a message saying “No driver found” It tells me that there is no driver for this installation for the device, and asks me if I want to install manually, or if I have a disk. When I try installing manually, it gives me a drop-down list of every driver for every device known to Linus. The only problem is that it doesn’t tell me what device is causing the heartburn.
Any suggestions? I’m guessing that it might be the wireless, because of the message on Ubuntu, but who knows?
[Update a few minutes later]
The exact (cryptic) message is “Unable to find device type needed for this installation type.”
Huh?
It’s Healed!
Miraculously (and mysteriously), my internal wireless adaptor started working yesterday. Unfortunately, that gives me one less excuse to return the laptop.
I still have to figure out what to do about Linux. Also, I’m unimpressed with Vista so far. Last night, the machine crawled almost to a halt. It’s a 2 GHz Turion with three gigs of RAM. It took forever for task manager to load, and it provided no information as to which process was causing the problem, but the CPU was saturated. I couldn’t even shut down applications, or the computer itself. I eventually had to just power it down. It’s been OK since I rebooted into safe mode, and then rebooted again, but I have no idea what was going on.
Flash Boot?
There was a comment in my previous post about my laptop problems that Vista doesn’t play well with others when it comes to dual boot. Could this be gotten around by booting Linux from a flash drive, or a CD?
[Update on Sunday morning]
How about a separate USB hard drive for the other OS?
It’s Always Something
Well, I got what I thought was a good deal on a laptop.
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
It’s Always Something
Well, I got what I thought was a good deal on a laptop.
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
Unresolved
Clark Lindsey has the press release from Scaled about last summer’s fatal accident. Short version, by my reading: we still don’t know what happened and probably never will, so we’re just going to be a lot more careful in the future.
I still think that they continue to overestimate the safety of hybrids, and that it wasn’t a great choice for propulsion. I suspect that if Burt were starting from scratch now, he’d go with a liquid, but shifting to one at this stage would involve too large of a redesign of the airframe.
The Era Of Carbon Craziness
Is it almost over? Let’s hope so.