Folks, I am sitting in a very nice little SF corner coffee house (not Starbux – they serve Kona as their house blend), and I am speaking to you via the wonders of Linux Ubuntu 7.1 Gutsy Gaboon, and Verizon EVDO, through the EVDO card built into my Lenovo X61 wonder machine notebook!
I am hard pressed not to type this all in CAPS, I am so giddy about this!
The last roadblock to using Linux as my main operating system has been destroyed.
Let me count the ways:
1. Thanks to Innotek Virtual Box, I am able to flawlessly run Quicken 2007, Pretty Good Solitaire, RoboForm, and even my stock charting program, TeleChart!
2. I have finally gotten BlueTooth to work with my machine, so my ‘tooth mouse is now fully operational! Same for my Jabra ‘tooth headphones.
3. I’ve gotten at least one of my music playback programs to work, and I have sound otherwise!
4. And now, finally, glory be to glory, I have EVDO working!
There is no longer any practical reason for me to give BillyBoy Gates so much as one more dime, let alone give him free rein to rummage through my personal computer hoping to stamp out sinful intellectual property!
I must give full credit, props, and utter gratitude to commenter FRNM, who posted the lead to what eventually became the solution to my EVDO battle, which I have been waging every since buying this computer. FRNM, thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’m a Linux Guy now!
Really!
I MEAN IT!!!!!!
(um, sorry about that….)
Glad the EVDO fix worked. I wish I could take credit for it, but the guy who posted the info on his site did all the heavy lifting.
It’s the sort of thing I would never have found on my own. I had tried the procedures outlined on the Sierra page a dozen times with no success.
The guy you linked finally gave me the clue why: the Sierra instructions themselves contained an obscure error, referencing a vendor id that had one number wrong.
I fixed that error, re-installed the driver, changed the modprobe instruction to fit, and presto! Everything worked.
But as I say, without your pointer to this guy, who had discovered the error, I would still be wandering in the wilderness today.
Oddly enough, the solution, once the error is known and fixed, actually is simple and straightforward.
Just as the Innotek Virtual Box solution to flawlessly running almost all Windows programs on top of a Linux OS is also simple and straightforward – and apparently not very well known.
Welcome to the Linux fold, where we all think for ourself.
Yes, we all think for ourselves.
Just how fast is that EV-DO connection?
Growler, it’s considerably faster than my home DSL connection.
I’ll post some stats later on.
What’s really cool is my windows programs run faster and stabler in Virtual Box on Linux than they do on XP, and the native Linux stuff is even faster still. (I use versions of Firefox and Thunderbird modified especially for Linux, called Swiftweasel and Swiftdove).
It’s the sort of thing I would never have found on my own.
Never say never. After a bit of unassisted poking around, something usually turns up. I suspect you would have found the solution in due time, assuming you didn’t toss the laptop out of frustration before then. 🙂