• Hitachi DK23BA-10 10GB hard drive
• Belkin F5D5050 10/100 USB ethernet adapter

I installed several OperatingSystems on the little computer before I settled on DebianGnuLinux^?. The rejected attempts were:

• Windows98^?
  • Seemed to work OK, but the USB ethernet was extremely flaky. It would pass 20-30 packets before it quit, and I'd have to unplug/replug the adapter and/or reboot the machine before I could access my LAN again.
• FreeBSD
  • The current stable version of FreeBSD, 4.5-STABLE, doesn't fully support the USB ethernet adapter. I was able to HackTheKernel^? source to make the system recognize it. However, I never could make the link light come on, which would have indicated that the adapter was initialized and ready for use.
• RedHat^? GnuLinux^?
  • I hadn't used RedHat^? in years, but I'd just burned a copy of the most recent release, version 7.2, for testing on one of my machine. I figured that it would be worth trying on the WebPlayer^?. The installer? Slick. Graphic interface configuration? It detected the graphics chips and immediately configured the X server correctly. Updating the Linux kernel to a version recent enough to support the ethernet adapter? Help! I'm in DependencyHell! I was so close to success that I could almost taste it, but just couldn't get past that final hurdle.

It was truly a relief to make the DebianGnuLinux^? BootFloppies^?, install the system, and type:

apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-386

then reboot the system and watch that ethernet light blink into joyous activity. The system works, with the annoying exception that the USB ethernet still cuts out after long periods of use. The huge advantage over Windows in this area is that I wrote a 4-line script to shut down networking, remove the Pegasus (ethernet) driver module from the kernel, re-load the Pegasus module, and restart networking. I made a launcher on my GnomePanel^? for the script. Whenever the ethernet connection dies, I unplug/re-plug the adapter, click the script's icon, and go back to work. Dang, I love having fine-level control over my own system.

That's pretty much the long and short of it. I have a free Pentium-class portable computer with a 10GB harddrive and ethernet capabilities. Thanks, Virgin!

Other message boards go into more detail about the subject.

-- KirkStrauser - 17 Mar 2002