Sony VAIO FX36 Notebook

[R Scott Belford]

Nice box, Warren.  Have fun with it.

I would buy the four port linksys switch/router.  They have developed a 
reputation for packing the most bang for your buck in the AP's.  They 
can be set up as plain AP's, but they can also work as wireless bridges 
in a very large deployment.  (This used to be much more expensive to 
do)  The switch is good and a hardware update will have you at 128 bit 
encryption.  Their pc cards have a poor reputation.  Poor signal quality 
mostly. I have experienced this personally and read a good thread about 
it recently on /. .  If your are dual booting, linksys does not support 
xp (yet) for the wireless pc card you need.  They didn't as of Xmas when 
some people needed some help.  Of course the AP could care less about 
your OS.

I have been using Apple's airport since early 2000 and have always been 
happy with its ability to route my wan to my lan (before I let the linux 
box do it), serve as a firewall, and forward port requests to 
appropriate lan machines.  The price is far higher than the linksys with 
few discernible differences (the airport does have a modem built in).

802.11a vs 802.11b
Will you use all the bandwidth b will afford you, and will you do so 
regularly?  Unless you have a really really fast connection or intend to 
stream video on your lan wirelessly, I don't see the need to pay more.  
I think a had better range, but there are a million antennae hacks for 
802.11b.

scott


On Wednesday, January 9, 2002, at 11:04 PM, Warren Togami wrote:

> I got home from the MPLUG seminar on Tuesday night, and my mom totally
> surprised me.  She bought two identical Sony VAIO notebooks, one for me
> and one for herself.  I'm like WHOA.
>
> $1,499
> 1GHz Athlon Palomino
> 512MB SDRAM
> DVD and CD/RW
> 15" really good screen
> Windows XP Home
>
> First thing I do is try to install Linux.  Red Hat 7.2 totally wouldn't
> recongize the partition format, and Mandrake 8.1 DiskDrake had severe
> problems.  Somebody (Sony or Microsoft) took extra lengths to screwing
> up the partition table of the VAIO to make it nearly impossible to
> install Linux without completely wiping the hard drive first.  Finally
> after some FAT32 resizing with diskdrake and parted, I got it mostly
> working but it is wasting 60MB of disk space that I cannot seem to
> reclaim.  (BTW GNU parted is an awesome tool.)
>
> After installation of Mandrake 8.1, the system wouldn't survive a boot.
> Upgraded my kernel to the latest Mandrake kernel from Cooker and it
> boots fine now.  Reading "dmesg" it said something about an Athlon bug
> workaround.
>
> So I have a working Mandrake 8.1 system.  I'm very happy now.  I didn't
> realize Mandrake uses ALSA by default now, along with numerous other
> improvements over the last time I played with Mandrake 8.0.  That
> rules.  I have to admit that Mandrake gets lot of stuff right... stuff
> that really annoys me about Red Hat.
>
> Some questions...
>
> I want to buy a wireless access point for my house.  Do you folks have
> any recommendations?  I was thinking about the Linksys Cable/DSL router
> 4 port 10/100 switch with wireless AP for about $150 at CompUSA.
>
> Any recommendations for PCMCIA wireless cards?  Should I buy 802.11a now
> for forward compatibility, or it costs too much?
>
> Thanks,
> Warren Togami
> warren at togami.com
>
>
>
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