Big Fat Ostrich

Dell are such a bunch of jerks, but D-Link runs a close second. Yeah, I kind of hinted at that awhile back, but now I’m trying to return my D-Link DIR-615, which is a huge piece of crap. So even though I love my Inspiron, I hate Dell for making me call D-Link, especially since I bought the thing from them.

So I called those D-Link guys:
“I want to return the router!”
“ok sir, I will work on your replacement.”
“No. I want to return it.”
“Yes, I will replace it.”
“Return!”
“Replace.”
“RETURN!”
“Replace, yes.”

Anyway, while we were talking, the line disconnected. When they tried calling me back twice, the line was silent both times. Like they were stalking me or something. They suck. I didn’t even hear any heavy breathing.

So I’ll try to live with it for another 24 hours. If it keeps on dropping connections, I’ll get them to replace it.

For now, I’m gonna eat an entire thing of Liberty Blackberry Yogurt. Have you ever tried it? It fucking rocks.

Yeah man, Blackberry Dude would be proud.

Yeah!

Yeah, I did it. I finally did it! I bought a laptop. A Dell Inspiron Core i3 64 bit 15 inch thing to be exact. It came preloaded with Windows 7 and the usual Dell crap and McAfee, which has a generous 10 day free trial. Wow guys. That was awesomely generous indeed!

So after about a week of tweaking this thing, checking out that thing, and generally yawning over the whole Windows 7 experience, I took the next plunge: INSTALL UBUNTU 10.04 LTS!

It worked out stellarly.

I’m glad I waited the week. I was going to install Karmic on it, but then I read that Karmic doesn’t support i3 processors. Lucid Lynx does, and the install was smooooth. In fact, this release is all about change. No longer can we refer to Ubuntu as “Brownbuntu”. That’s right. They’ve removed that hideous brown theme and went with a purpley splash screen. It’s a little sleeker than the last release, and maybe even edging a little closer to Mac OS in style. Still, it feels like Linux and performs great.

Everything works. Video, audio, and the integrated wireless card. It’s kind of ridiculous for me to call it an integrated wireless card in this day and age, isn’t it? It’s a laptop! Everything is integrated!

So, after the install, I installed VirtualBox OSE and installed Windows 7 as a VM. That’s where Windows 7 will live. Forever. And with the VM running, you can really feel that you’re getting your value out of those 4 gigs of RAM. You don’t even feel it, even with Compiz running which is on by default. I may tweak Lynx to use less memory, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that there is no lag whatsoever, no matter what I do!

Now. About the D-Link 615 piece of crap router that I bought from  Dell with my order. I’m about to break the thing in half and go back to my wired router. Wireless is fine. Wired is fine. Browsing anywhere on the ‘ternets? Fine! How about ssh from my laptop back to my wired server? It doesn’t fucking work. I can reach my wired network from my wired machine. But the router seems to be blocking ssh and port 443 just from the wireless network. I’m 100% sure that this has nothing to do with my Dell Inspiron I3.

And yeah, I forwarded ports 443 and 22. Don’t think I didn’t, cause I did.

I’ll let you know how it all works out!