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Well, the USB mobile broadband dongle from ‘3′ finally arrived. I ordered this online on 21st Dec, admittedly not the best time to expect prompt deliveries, but I ordered other items from Hong Kong & UK over the same period which were delivered quicker than something from within Australia – why is that?

A 2003 IBM r40e is not a high-end laptop, but it is reliable, and will handle just about anything you need in the way of mobile computing. This unit was relatively cheap in 2003 when I bought it, only AUD$1,400.00. I bought a few extras for it over time to extend it’s capabilities such as a Minitar 802.1b wireless PCMCIA card, and a 3 port USB 2.0 PCMCIA card.

Last year I was finally able to rid the ‘craptop’ of it’s default Windows XP Home OS, replacing it with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. After trying many Linux variations over the years, Jaunty was the first to actually run everything, and after installing ndiswrapper to contain the ‘windows’ wireless drivers for the Mintar card, wireless connections to my home network are faultless with networking available as soon as the desktop has loaded. I also recently tried 9.10 Karmic Koala, but graphics support seemed broken for the IBM, so I re-installed Jaunty (note: Karmic works great on my desktop PC).

After seeing a friends Toshiba laptop connect to the internet using a Virgin brand USB Broadband dongle running from a live Jaunty CD, I knew Ubuntu had got their wireless support RIGHT. (continue reading…)