A few days after installing Ubuntu, I took my Ubuntu CDs and my laptop to my local library. It's a small library in the Tanasbourne Shopping Mall; it sits between Pasta Pronto and Beard's Framing. Unlike Starbuck's or Barnes&Noble, the wireless connection there is free.

I'm old enough to remember when libraries were quiet places with tables, chairs, and books. The carrel where I can plug my laptop in is next to the children's video section, and pre-teens with their Moms whisper and chatter and seach through the shelves behind me. There is a quiet place in the library, but there's no electrical outlet there.

I had arranged to meet a friend there. I used to work with Shannon years ago. I had 128M of extra laptop memory that I offered him in an email, and he said he'd bring both his laptop and his wife's in and check if the memory was compatible. I was using a Dell Latitude D800 that I bought with 2G, its max, but I had upgraded my IBM Thinkpad R40. Windows says it runs with 128M, but it's really slow. I think if I had known it had only 128M, I would have added memory a long time ago, but I kept thinking it had 256M, and Windows should run fine with that.

But when I noticed it had 128M, I bought two 512M DIMMs, one for each of my two memory slots. The manual says the R40 maxes at 1G, so I was reluctant to try a 1G DIMM. Anyway, the IBM runs nifty now with 1G, and I had that 128M DIMM free to a good home.

Shannon came in with a screwdriver and two laptops, and gave him my wrist strap, and while he hunted for a place to clip it, looking suspiciously at a metal outlet plate, I booted Ubuntu from the Live CD and showed him its Display Manager. He said, how can you save any files that way and I thought why would you want to, it's a demo to check out drivers, but I later thought you might be able to mount an external drive, possibly even a partition from the laptop's internal drive.

Back home (this is jumping ahead I know) I have a Dell workstation that can boot to either Windows XP or Ubuntu. Ubuntu has automatically mounted the Windows partitions (I even have icons on my desktop), but these mounts are unfortunately only accessible by root. What I can do, though, is open a terminal window, become root, cd to the mount, and copy files to my home directory, careful to both chown and chgrp back to my non-root user. This partitioning is the same I used when I dual booted between Windows XP and RedHat 9, except then I had what I called a transfer partition, formatted as FAT32, that I manually mounted. I had read that Linux had difficulty reading NTFS; that why I made that FAT32 transfer partition. However, Ubuntu seems to have no difficulty reading NTFS, and I don't have to manually mount the Windows partitions.

So, I don't know, but it may be possible to boot from the Live CD, mount a Windows partition and save files.

Shannon asked how you take out the memory card, and I muttered something about clips. I was preoccupied because Ubuntu was not recognizing my internal wireless card, and I kept poking through network configuration screens. I saw Shannon out of the corner of my eye trying to pry the memory out with a screwdriver. “I'm not sure that's a good idea,” I said and reached over to pop the clips with my fingers. He brushed my hand away; well, after all, he was the one wearing the grounding strap. It was a bust anyway; it turned out that both of Shannon's laptops were a few years old, and my memory fit in neither.

About not finding the wireless card. The wireless connection in the library is somewhat unstable. I don't know why and neither do any of the library clerks. About every hour or so, you lose the connection; but then, if you just wait, the connection comes back. Someone once suggested that it might be due to interference from a 2.4 Ghz phone, but it seems more likely that the access point periodically reboots itself. I checked with one of the librarians, and she assured me that the library did not perodically boot people off their Internet connection and that she had no idea what was causing the problem.

But this is a different issue than Ubuntu not finding the wireless card. The card in my Dell, although identified as a Dell Wireless WLAN 1350 is actually a Broadcom card, and Broadcom refuses to release specifications and drivers to the opensource community. The result is that for Linux to work with this card, you have to use a utility called ndiswrapper, which as I understand it is essentially a windows emulator for wireless drivers. The only way to access those closed-source drivers is to make them think you're a Windows machine. The other alternative is to use an Intel/Cisco wireless card, which is what I actually ordered when I bought my laptop, but it came with the Dell card, and it was cheaper and for months it worked fine. There is an opensource reverse-engineered project called bcm43xx, but it'll be some time before it produces any results.

I don't want to put Ubuntu on my laptop anyway. I do a lot of Windows work on it, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Virtual PC. It's full of sample programs and documentation. I take it with me to meetings about Windows. I decided to put Ubuntu on a Dell workstation I had at home, a Dimension 2350.

I was still thinking about whether to dual boot or not and didn't decide until right up when I was putting in the Install CD. It wasn't so much that I wanted another Windows machine; I just thought that if for some reason the Ubuntu installation failed, I'd have an unworking machine and would have to reinstall Windows, which is not only time-consuming but I worry about all that activation nonsense. My original Windows CD is pre-SP2, which could mean a series of time-consuming updates.

The last time I loaded Linux, I partitioned the drive with PartitionMagic. I decided to keep that partitioning. Here's how it looks.