EVDO on Linux

A friend of mine is lending me her EVDO card for my trip to Cincinnati this weekend. I thought itwouldbe a good idea to gowithCryssy and her parents on their convention trip – even if it does mean I have to leave at 3am.

So I spent half of Tuesday night trying to get it to work properly. The card is a Sprint Novatel Wirless Ovation 727 with a integrated microSD slot. From what I’ve read online so far, you have to shutdown and boot up everytime for it to read it as a USB drive. Then you have to eject the USB drive to have it read it as a CDMA modem. What a pain in the ass to say the least.

I’ve taken the card with the laptop to work today to test out some different scenarios to determine a best practice. If I find one, I’ll post it here.

My experience with Ubuntu

I’ve installed Linux on my former Vista-only laptop and I’m not looking back.

That’s right. Ubuntu – a Linux distro – is now gracing it’s very own partition on the Vista laptop. It’s running better than ever since the install. Unfortunately, using it as a Linux-only machine isn’t practical right now, since Cryssy still needs the machine occasionally for some Windows-based applications that won’t run properly on the Fusion software for our iMacs.

It’s wonderful. It’s so lightweight there’s no lag time on the OS running time. No lag when opening windows and no background processes to fight with. I can just work. I don’t foresee Linux taking over my life and replacing Mac OS X, mind you, but it would be an ideal choice for an older PC that just won’t cut it (specs-wise) for XP or Vista (or even Windows 7).

I am still getting use to the interface. It’s a bit of a blend of OS 9 and Windows XP. Since the laptop has a glossy screen, the graphics show up beautifully on the display.

I’m still having some difficulty installing some applications, such as Adobe AIR for Linux. I believe this is due to Adobe not informing Linux distro users that Flash Player 10 is required for Linux before it will install properly. I will have to try this tonight and see if it offers any improvement. If not, I can always crowdsource for the answer on Twitter.