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At the November Harrisburg Tweetup, a discussion started regarding cell phone carriers. As usual, it became an all out war. Why do people defend their phone carrier like its a religion and fight anybody that’s on a different carrier? Seriously!

People seem to have no problem spending hours defending their cell phone carrier. For what reason? Just because it works for you, why does it have to work for everybody else? I’m tired of people trying to shove their opinions down everybody else’s throat. I choose what works best for me, you choose what works best for you. If I have an issue with my phone carrier, I’ll change to a different one. If you have an issue with my phone carrier, bite your tongue and keep it to yourself. I’m tired of hearing about it.

Of course, the whole Verizon/AT&T dispute only makes things worse for everybody.

Ryan Personal att, phone, rant, religion, sprint, tmobile, verizon, Wireless

I got my new MSI Wind U100-432US on Friday. After starting it up and updating the BIOS, I installed Fedora 10. Since many netbooks don’t have CD/DVD drives and I already had a network server set up to do network installs from, I made a local copy of the Fedora 10 base repo via rsync before it arrived. I then found a utility called unetbootin to make a bootable USB drive that I could start the network install from and it worked great. I basically installed it and plugged in the USB drive, told it I wanted Fedora 10 i386 network install and selected my boot drive. unetbootin copied the image files from the Fedora repo and made my USB drive bootable. I then restarted and installed Fedora 10 in a matter of minutes over my local network.

After the install, everything seemed to be working except the wireless. I was able to find out that the wireless card was a RaLink card instead of RealTek like I had expected. That caused a change of plans. I was having trouble tracking down drivers for the RaLink card and was having issues trying to build from source with WPA support. In the end, I found a repo that had the drivers already there and it simplified things. My system was a mess after that so, alas, I booted from my USB drive again and did a clean install.

Here are the quick and easy steps to get wireless working on a MSI Wind U100-432US:

1. Install Fedora 10

2. Post install, run a yum upgrade to get your system up to date:

sudo yum upgrade

3. Once you’re up to date, install the RPM Fusion repos

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora"

sudo rpm --import "http://rpmfusion.org/keys?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora"

4. Install the RaLink 2860 driver which is compatible with the RaLink 2790 installed in the MSI Wind U100-432US

sudo yum install kmod-rt2860

5. Reboot

After the reboot, if you click the Network Manager icon, you should see wireless options that were previously not there.

Ryan Technology Fedora, Laptop, linux, MSI Wind, Wireless