Whenever I have had an issue with Linux on my laptop the same suggestion was tossed at me over and over “why not try a live CD?” Well at the time the penguins and I were not ready to move away from our hard install. We were on a mission, a mission that failed miserably, but a mission non-the-less. Now, after careful consideration and a ton of fish, the penguins are once again ready to play the ‘name that distro’ game on my laptop. First up Mepis…..

I chose Mepis because a friend, Mandeep, suggested it. Unfortunately it did not work for me. This is due my wonderful broadcom 4318 not working again! I know that this is becoming a theme, but I am a student and will not be changing any of my hardware so that is not viable advise at this point – that means you JZA…So my goal is to try different Live CDs until I find a distro that is compatible with my wifi.

This being said, I loved the first impression of Mepis, and I know that had I installed it I might have been able to get the window drivers and the card talking…maybe I will go back to Mepis when I decide that I want to do this, but due to the limitations of a live CD, all I could do was hope that it worked out of the box, it didn’t. Here is how it when:

• Went to Mepis.org for the live CD and then started up my laptop – booted off the CD ROM
• Messed up, forgot to push the CD into the holder, so it got stuck in the computer, swore a little, drank a beer, shook the laptop, finally slide out and I started again.
• For me it went straight to the graphic log one site, however it might also bring you to the black terminal window. In this case press Ctrl Alt F7 and it will bring you to the graphic log in. Here you press the cute little penguin entitled Root and then the password is root again. (This is due to you not being able to set up accounts on the live CD; it comes with a couple of accounts as default).
• First impression, great red! The desktop was a saturated warm screen with large round icons and many perks, including a little aquarium at the bottom of the screen. Not sure what it does, but it sure is pretty. You can add applets like binary clocks, or weather indicators. There were games like Tetris, and the mail client seemed very user friendly.

*******ROAD BLOCK********

• Surprise, surprise, my wifi was not picked up decided not to give up!
• Went on the Mepis site on the desk top, the Mepis CD on my laptop, monitored my router on Jon’s Laptop…..here we go!
• The instructions on the Mepis Forums told me that this is a common problem, that the module with Mepis often doesn’t work for B/C 4318 and that it needs to be blacklisted (told not to be used) that way we can then introduce our own ( Ndiswrapper).
• So to edit the black list you need to click the little house icon on the Mepis desktop, then go to /etc/modprobe.d/, then go to the blacklist file and click. Type in blacklist bcm 43xx ( this will blacklist all modules that start with 43)

******ROAD BLOCK*******

• *)(&&^* Can’t do it with the live CD…can’t save the change since the file system is read only
• Decided to try the native driver – using wireless config tools. First assigned a password and ESSID (station ID of router) by typing iwconfig eth1 essid [our essid]. Then typed iwconfig eth1 key [WEP key]. Now the router and the card should be able to talk with each other.
• Typed dhclient eth1 (go get an IP address). Watched on Jon’s laptop and apparently all the steps of Discover/offer/request/ and acknowledge happened. But the client, my computer is failing in the end.

End of Mepis, next time…..who knows…..