From: Dan Mills (vthunder_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Sep 06 2004 - 09:05:09 PDT
On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 13:27:03 -0700, James Nichols <smilr_at_mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, September 1, 2004, at 10:14 AM, Jim Witte wrote:
> >
> >> Um.. getting wireless working took me a couple of *days*, and there
> >> was a bunch of resetting involved. Even now that I have it set-up,
> >> whenever I change my location I have to reset or it won't dhcp
>
> Funny - the experience was MUCH smoother for me. ALthough occasionally
> it won't dhcp on the first try - but after whatever app I was using
> with the internet tells me I can't connect I could ALWAYS re-select my
> active worksite and try again successfully - no restart necessary. Have
> you tried this?
Sorry for my late reply, been busy lately..
I played with it some more. It seems that I can sometimes wait for
the dhcp to time out, take the card out and put it back in, make sure
the location is set right, and it'll then dhcp correctly. However, at
least once, my Newton became all upset with me and decided to just
reboot itself. So I still just reboot it when I change locations and
want to use wifi (actually not that often).
However, my comment about taking me days was more general--what I view
as the biggest problems with the Newton set-up, based on my
experience, are more or less (please skip this mail now if stupid
lists of problems bore you):
* HW is getting old, some parts are hard to find. e.g., I still
haven't gotten a dongle, though I do have one of the "dongle cables",
but it meant finding a windows machine to do the setup in. (einstein
to the rescue?).
* Web pages are getting old. I used google a lot, and there are a
*ton* of dead links out there. Luckily, I eventually found the wiki,
and some other great resources. I guess in time the dead links will
dissapear from search engines.
* On the software side, it was annoying that Newton packages don't
enforce dependencies. That is, dependencies exist (like, you have to
install NIE before httlib, etc), but you can very easily install one
package and not the other, and stuff just won't work right. I am used
to having a tool to do dependency management for me on linux. To make
things worse, often the packages had to be retrieved from different
places. And even worse--some packages are licensed such that they may
not be redistributed (e.g., wifi driver), so they *have* to be in
different places.
Finally,
* I was (and still am) a clueless newbie. So half of the time I
didn't know what I was doing (and still don't :)
-Dan
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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