German Superstitions

After my last post, I started thinking about all the humorous superstitions that I have come across during my time in Germany. I would like to point out that I am no doctor and don’t actually know if any of these are valid or not. I just think they are funny. Also, I’m not trying to rip on Germans here. As an American, I can think of an equally long list of ridiculous superstitions and behaviors that are stereotypically American. This is meant to be funny.

1) A draft is detrimental to one’s health.

I’m not sure what the reasoning or background to this one is, but I see it all the time. If I am sitting in a train in the summer and the temperature is approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit (see below for superstition about air conditioning), I might think it is a good idea to open the tiny little window that would allow a tiny bit of airflow into the passenger compartment. Every time I have attempted this or seen it attempted by some other unknowing tourist, the idea has been shot down either by a) an old lady that will give the evil eye, stand up, march over to the window, make a big fuss and slam the window closed as hard as possible and yell “ES ZIEHT!!!” (English: There’s a draft!), march back over to her seat, sit down and glare at the offender for about a half an hour to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. b) The conductor will come by and lock all the windows as soon as the train starts moving to make sure that we don’t ever get into situation a.

2) Stale air.

This one isn’t really so unreasonable, but it is still quite funny to witness. Every German has to open every window in every room of the house for at least 20 minutes per day. It makes sense of course to air out each room. It helps avoid mold problems and such and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a German use an air freshener because of this habit. What is hilarious is when this requirement somehow conflicts with the first superstition about a draft. The problem is that if you open two windows on opposite sides of an apartment, there will be a nice breeze that flows through the apartment. This may never happen. You must first open the windows on one side of the house and after closing them you can open windows on the other side of the house. You could also open them all at once, but you must make sure that every single door is closed to ensure that no air actually moves. If you plan on leaving the room you are in, you should close the window first before opening the door, otherwise you might create a temporary draft and the door will slam behind you. Every person has their own morning ritual about airing out the apartment. It is pretty standard and all windows and balcony doors in Germany have three modes: closed, swinging open and tilting open. The “tilting open” mode is usually the only one used for airing out a room as that minimizes the draft.

3) Air Conditioning is bad for you.

I’m not sure if it is because it is “artificial air”, or because the air is dry, or what the deal is with air conditioning, but Germans are deathly afraid of it. At a minimum it will give you a cold, but it could very easily disrupt your Kreislauf (English: blood circulation). I’ve never seen an apartment or house anywhere in Munich with air conditioning. I’ve seen fewer than 10% of businesses use air conditioning in the summer, and it seems that only in recent years is it becoming standard equipment on cars, although I’m pretty sure this also only applies to imports. In the US you can’t buy a BMW without air conditioning. Here, you have to pay extra for it, since only a fool would use it anyway. The few times I’ve seen air conditioning in use here, the temperature is just 2 or 3 degrees below the outside sweltering heat, so it is pretty much useless anyway. At my office, only the server room is air conditioned. I used to keep it at 16 degrees Celsius, and I enjoyed going in there during the summer. My boss told me it would be fine to raise the temperature up to 20 degrees. Yesterday I was showing the new sysadmin the server room and he was shocked that we are running at 20 degrees instead of 25, which would be plenty cool. I think mostly they are afraid of abrupt changes in temperature.

4) Abrupt changes in temperature.

I had a German ask my advice about traveling through Death Valley once. I told him not to worry too much, since all rental cars these days have air conditioning and Death Valley is pretty cool. You drive around comfortably, stop and get out for a bit while being amazed at how ridiculously hot it is, look around, get back in the car with the A/C on full blast and drive home. He said he was pretty sure that that would severely affect his Kreislauf and was considering skipping the trip altogether.  Recently it has been quite cold here in Munich. Way below freezing a couple of days. I’ve heard complaints that the regional trains use heaters in the passenger compartments, because while it is nice and comfortable during your hour long commute, once you get to your final destination, you are pretty much doomed to instant death as soon as you step off the train into the cold outside.

5) No swimming after eating.

Now, I’ve heard this one in the US as well. I should probably submit it to Mythbusters for a final confirmation, but from what I understand, if you eat a full meal and then immediately go swimming afterward, your body will tend to cramp up, making swimming and breathing difficult and there is a possibility of drowning if you are in a deep area and unsupervised. That sounds perfectly reasonable and whether it is true or not, I can accept that and don’t plan on sneaking off to an abandoned pool right after eating a 7 course meal and jumping straight into a deep end. However the way I’ve seen German interpret this “guideline” about eating and swimming is along the lines of if you ingest anything regardless of how minute, and within precisely 30 minutes happen to submerge any part of your body in water deeper than a small puddle, not only will every muscle in your body cramp up immediately, your Kreislauf will go into shock and you’ll be dead within minutes. True story. I vividly remember when I was a child of about 11 years old, there was an outdoor swimming pool nearby and during summer vacation it was great to get a bunch of friends together and two or three of the moms would come along to supervise and we’d all go to the outdoor pool for an afternoon. The moms would usually just gossip and sunbathe and all of us kids would go swimming. There was a small water slide and a few diving boards. There was a big grassy area to just lounge around and sunbathe and hang out and there was even a small concession stand. Well, after swimming for a bit and just enjoying the afternoon, it was time for a break, so I headed back to where the moms and the towels were. Two of my friends were sitting there, one of them enjoying a popsicle and the other was eating a small basket of fries with ketchup. As is the social norm whenever you see your friend eating fries, I went ahead and reached over and grabbed one and popped it in my mouth. About 5 minutes later I decided that it was boring there and got up to go lounge with my feet in the pool in the shallow area where all the toddlers hung out. Well my foot almost got to the water when I was swept up by my friend’s mom, who was frantically screaming and rushing me back to where everyone else was and was yelling at me along the lines of “I can’t believe how foolish you are! Have your parents taught you nothing?!? You almost died just now!!!!”. Completely confused by this, I asked what miserable fate I had barely escaped thanks to her watchful eye over me. The response was “Don’t you know that you have to wait 30 minutes after eating?!? I saw you eat that french fry and I want you to sit down here for 30 minutes before you even think about going back to the pool!”.

6) Kreislauf

The German language has a neat way of turning concepts into neat little nouns that can be put into the singular very easily. In English it is more difficult to refer to ones blood circulation, because you aren’t talking about the blood itself, but rather the motion of it throughout your body through veins and arteries. Anyway in German this whole concept is known as “Kreislauf” and apparently this is the sole determinant of your current condition and you can feel the most minute changes. Now, I’m no doctor and just because I have never been able to actually *feel* the blood pumping through my body outside of my feeling my pulse, I can’t really say they are wrong about this. I just think it is funny that pretty much every German I’ve met has this at the top of their worry-list and I’ve never even heard of anything close from Americans. When conversing with Germans, it is normal to ask how things are going, how are the kids, how is the Kreislauf, etc. Pretty much everything in life can affect your Kreislauf and it is of utmost importance to not disturb it. For instance the reasoning for not eating a heavy meal in the evening is because it is bad for your Kreislauf. When a German has just returned from a trip abroad and had a long flight, you always have to ask how the flight was and the answer will almost always be “well, it was a good flight, but I can always feel it in my Kreislauf when I fly for so long”. Every aspect of a German’s life is to appease the Kreislauf. The only reason for working out, eating healthy, getting exercise, sleeping the proper amount of time each night and going to bed and getting up at the same time every day is for the Kreislauf. It is also the only reason that Germans have to have 6 weeks of vacation per year, and the only reason to go hiking in the mountains. It is to recover the Kreislauf. By law every German gets at least 4 weeks of vacation per year and most people get 5 or 6, and by law you have to use it all the year you get it, because if you don’t, your Kreislauf suffers from it. The way that Germans know when they’ve had enough to drink is because they can start to feel it in their Kreislauf. As consequence to drinking too much, Americans get hangovers. Germans get hangovers too, but don’t care about them. The real problem is the almost irreparable damage to the Kreislauf. It actually goes so far that you can go to any doctor in Germany and say that your Kreislauf just isn’t feeling like it should and he’ll immediately prescribe you two weeks off from work. You can call your boss any day and just tell him that something isn’t right with your Kreislauf and you will be sympathetically told to stay home with pay and try to relax so that you can recover.

6) Sore throat? Wear a scarf!

The only real reason to wear a scarf in Germany is to help heal a sore throat. I actually don’t see too many men wearing scarves in cold weather when they are healthy, but as soon as you start to get a cold or a sore throat, you put on a scarf and don’t take it off for a couple of weeks. Germans will wear a scarf in bed if they have a sore throat. I’ve confronted Germans about this before, like when walking into a friend’s house in mid-August and it is sweltering heat outside and inside and my friend comes to the door wearing shorts, t-shirt and a scarf. “What’s with the scarf?” – “Oh, I have a sore throat”. Perfectly logical. After asking what the scarf does for the sore throat, I just get a blank stare and something like “everybody knows that when you have a sore throat you have to wear a scarf. It is the only cure!” This is so deep in the culture and it is quite hilarious. It is so standard that all you have to do is start wearing a scarf indoors and the first person you see will offer you some tea and give you a “I hope you get well soon!” without even having to ask if you are sick. It is just a direct correlation. All people that have sore throats always wear scarves and all people wearing scarves indoors must have a sore throat. I’ll point out that there are also some gay and metrosexual men that will wear scarves indoors as a part of their outfit even when they don’t have a sore throat, but you can usually tell by the kind of scarf it is.

7) Others.

There are many other superstitions that come up from time to time, but I’ll stop here for now and I’ll update this post with more as I think of them. There are also some smaller ones, like “women who sit on concrete surfaces will become sterile” and “when riding on the subway, you have to sit facing the direction of travel”, but they aren’t u

Back to the States… Again. Mozilla-style!

As I hinted in my last post, I’ll be moving to California this month. It is almost hilariously ironic that pretty much exactly two years ago I did this exact same move. Back then I moved to the Bay Area, stayed with a friend for a few months while looking for work, only to find a job back in Munich. So now I’ve been in Munich again since mid-2008 with my wife and we’ve decided that although living here is nice, it isn’t really where we want to spend our future. Life as an expatriate can be fun, but it can also be difficult. One can’t really compare the different cultures to each other as there are so many differences, yet so many similarities. It pretty much comes down to how you like your day to day life. Sure it has been great living two blocks away from the Oktoberfest, but that only comes around once a year. Yeah, it is awesome to be able to head on down to the Hofbräuhaus after work and drink with the locals, or get authentic Italian food and great Indian food on pretty much every street corner. These are some of the things that make Munich a great place to live. But it is the day-to-day life of paying too much rent for a small apartment, waiting for the bus that is never on time, getting dirty looks from old ladies on the bus, people shoving you off the subway when you aren’t walking fast enough for them and people never apologizing when they run into you. Getting to work and trying to fit in is always awkward. The strange social norms here are quite comical at first, but after a while you just kind of want to kick the next person you see wearing a scarf indoors “because of a sore throat”. Germans are deathly afraid of abrupt temperature changes, air conditioning, and in some cases heating. I actually heard someone complain recently that the train they took to work had the heater on when it was below freezing outside. It’s great for the hour train ride, but once they get off the train at the destination, the cold air outside will instantly send their body into shock and only if they are extremely lucky will they avoid instant death. I know. It sounds funny at first, but seriously I don’t think I can take it anymore.

Ok, so to shorten this long rant I will get to my point. Late last year my wife and I decided that we would start considering the possibility of moving back to the US. I casually applied for some jobs here and there with no real hopes. Then I found my holy grail. I noticed that Mozilla was looking for a Systems Administrator. This had kind of been my dream job ever since I was in college. Back then, we’ll say 2005 or 2006, I was just starting to get into open source software and linux and servers and really becoming a computer geek. Anyway a good friend of mine got an internship at Mozilla in Mountain View and after he moved there from Oregon, I decided to go visit him. While I was there, Mozilla was hosting an open house of some sort and I got invited to go check out the company behind everyone’s favorite browser. I was truly amazed when I got there. The people were all really friendly, knowledgeable and passionate about open source and making the web a better place. I had no idea that anything like this existed. Everyone I met seemed extremely happy, everyone loved their job. I thought I had a good job at the time, but never had I seen everyone at my place of employment be genuinely happy to be at work every day. I got the feeling that there was no such thing as a disgruntled Mozillian. I was impressed. Unfortunately I didn’t see myself ever getting to work there, because they already had desktop support people, and that was pretty much the extent of my experience at the time. They were still a pretty small company and were mainly focused on hiring developers and such. I wrote it off as a dream that would never come true and always hoped that someday I would find a place to work with such energetic colleagues. Well to date this hadn’t happened. I graduated college, entered the real world, got a job at a small tech firm which seemed like a good place to work, but once I got there I realized that there is no such thing as a “fun” place to work. Yeah, you have good days and bad days and you have fun with what you are working on, but I haven’t encountered anything like what I saw at Mozilla. So once I saw that they were looking for a Sysadmin and the job description pretty much matched my experience exactly, I applied for it. I couldn’t reasonably think that I would be so lucky to get an interview, but I could dream. Things that good just don’t happen to me. Plus it all seemed to perfect to really work out. The timing was right. They were looking for someone, just as I was getting disgruntled with my current job. My wife and I decided we would love to move to Northern California if the opportunity ever presented itself. But again, we didn’t really think I would get this job, it was just simply too good to be true.

Well, after two months of phone interviews, a trip to California and back, pleasant experiences all the way around, I was offered the job and of course I accepted it. It took some negotiating with my old company to let me leave in a reasonable amount of time (normally you have to give 3 months notice to quit a job in Germany), and I have to stick around long enough to train my replacement, but in less than a month I’ll be starting my dream job in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Now the stress of moving is starting to hit me. Gotta pack everything, plan everything, cancel cell phone contracts, utilities, apartment, find a new apartment, figure out how to move cats internationally, figure out how to get my car from Oregon (it has been sitting for two years), etc., etc.

Happy New Year!

We just spent New Year’s Eve in downtown Munich at the Marienplatz, where there didn’t appear to be any official or formal fireworks going on, but the Munichites are never to disappoint with an awesome, albeit very unsafe, firework show of their own. It is a spectacular show and being right in the middle of it feels like there are bombs going off all around you. Of course like any Munich event where mass amounts of people are gathered in a small area drinking mass amounts of alcohol there are the obligatory ambulances driving through the crowds here and there trying to save people from their own stupidity. My friends and I survived the event though and will always cherish the memory. Also here is a little video clip taken right around midnight. There was no countdown that I could hear, but you can tell when midnight hit because of the density of fireworks going off.

This will likely have been our last New Year’s in Munich for a while, as a move to the San Francisco Bay Area is in our immediate future, but more on that later.

Happy New Year!!

Happy 4th of July!

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy 4th of July, all the way from Munich. We are celebrating today with some Americans and some Germans and doing a real American style grillfest, albeit an indoor one, due to the rain forecast. But it’ll be Hamburgers, Louisiana Grillers (some kind of bratwurst labelled as such, not sure if they have any affiliation with the State of Louisiana), all grilled on a family sized George Foreman grill. To top it off, we got 10 cans of “Stars and Stripes” brand root beer and Karen made a beautiful American style Duncan Hines yellow cake with “whipped-fluffy-white” frosting:

Happy 4th of July!!

New Server, New Theme, Database Troubles

A few weeks ago, my websites were no longer available.  Without any explanation or reason from my webhost, any visit to justindow.com or dowhaus.com resulted in a weird “This website is suspended” page. I couldn’t figure out a reason for this, since I could still log in to my account just fine and all my registrations and payments were current. Instead of messing around with their support people, I decided to take the opportunity to change hosts. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. I just wasn’t impressed with the speed of their server. Also, they had recently “upgraded” my account to have unlimited storage space, but this also was just an empty promise, since the actual hard drive that housed my account was nearly full, with only about 3 gigs of space on it. So the idea of keeping them around for remote backup purposes also didn’t work out.

Anyway, I moved my domain registration and websites, and am now much happier with the performance. I have much more control over my DNS entries server software.

During the move I encountered a small problem with my WordPress database that this blog uses. At the old webhost, the database was set to use latin1_swedish_ci collation. When dumping the database there and importing it into my new server, all the German Umlauts and other non-ASCII characters were mysteriously changed to illegible strings of nonsense. I am no SQL expert and wasn’t sure where the problem was coming up. Re-dumping the database to a textfile using mysqldump and then opening the file with vi showed all the umlauts as a weird string. Dumping the database and piping the output through iconv and into a text file showed different weird strings. None of which ever converted back to legible characters, no matter how I tried to view the file (vi, kate, less). I also tried a few different settings on the new database server, like creating the database with the same charset. Nothing I tried seemed to bring my Umlauts back.

I eventually gave up, opened the dump file in vi, identified the character strings that needed converting using this guy’s blog post as a guide, and did a quick “search and replace” with vi:

:%s/oldstring/newstring/g

I ran that on each string in the list and re-imported the dump into the new database. After then having some trouble logging into the blog’s admin area, I found it was useful to rename the Plugins directory. After the plugins get deactivated, adding them back in one at a time worked fine. It choked on one of them, but it isn’t one I use anymore anyway. Now my blog is back up and running and things are looking good.

Meet Maeby and Lucy

Meet Maeby and Lucy. They were born on September 16th, 2008, so they are 6 weeks old today. They are super friendly and don’t seem to be afraid of anything. They are busily exploring our new apartment and trying to find ways to cause trouble.

We had been looking for a set of kittens ever since we’ve had our new apartment. We really wanted to get Molly back, but her current owner doesn’t want to give her up, so we had to start fresh. After a few weeks of looking, I realized that it is rather difficult to get kittens in Germany, since they don’t seem to have pet stores that sell them. Most of the kittens in the newspaper ads cost money, or require some kind of strict background check before they let you have them. After being rather discouraged, I came across an ad for 4 young kittens for free. By the time we got out there to pick two out, there were only two left, so the choice was easy. Maeby is a short-haired little cutie, while Lucy has long hair and a pretty little face. They are both very cuddly and figured out the litterbox system right away.

Married!

Well it has been a long time since I’ve posted to the old blog. And although I have had plenty to rant about lately, it seems I haven’t had the motivation to actually rant about it. So here is a non-ranting post. I have great news. I got married last week on August 9th. The wedding was a huge success. A lot of close friends came and family traveled from all around the world for that special day. Everything went smoothly and it was the happiest day of my life. Now my beautiful new bride and I are living back in Germany, since I am now working there again with a new job. (Yeah, really a lot has happened since I last blogged. More on that later…). So I just wanted to post up here to let folks know that I am still alive and things are looking up for me personally and professionally.

Here is one of the highlights of the wedding:

Yup, that is Mike V. jumping to grab it. And never one to disappoint, he was successful.

I want to thank everyone that contributed to this wonderful day and all the hard work and money that was spent on it. Thank you Dennis, Tara, Melissa, Jessica, Michelle, Heidi, Karin, Travis, Fred, Luke, Reed, Mike, Rand, Sandy, Dennis, Niel, Alexandria, and well the rest of you know who you are. Thank you very much for everything, and thank you Karen, my lovely wife, for making me the happiest man ever.

Back in the States

It has been quite a while since I updated my blog. That is mostly because I’ve been quite busy lately, completely re-organizing my life. At the beginning of February I moved from the beautiful city of Munich, Germany to the small town of Vacaville, California, which is somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco, right where I-80 has all the potholes. I’m pretty sure one could get rich around here being an auto mechanic specializing in suspension repairs…

I chose Vacaville, because it seems to be a good central location for finding work in either Sacramento or the Bay Area, and I will probably move to one of those places once I find something. I have a good friend who is nice enough to let me share his apartment with him here in Vacaville for the next couple of months, while I plan my wedding (yes, I’ll be getting married in August!), and sort out what I’m going to do with my life.

I got engaged back in October, at which point it became clear that I need to find a better-paying job than what I was able to get in Munich. Either that or move to a place where the cost of living isn’t so high. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Northern California, so that is where I ended up. I quit my job in Germany at the end of January, and flew into SFO the first week of February. The weather here is pretty nice, but I do miss the cold and snow in Munich.

At my previous job, I learned quite a bit about embedded systems and gained some experience with openembedded.org, as well as ARM-based Debian and even dipped my hands into an interpreted dialect of LISP known as PicoLisp and started learning some Python. My strengths, however, still lie in system administration and networking, whereas programming and scripting is something I’d rather do as a hobby than a career. I have found a new interest in communications-based software and hardware as relates to routing, wi-fi, 3G networks and so on.

On the desktop side of things, I am now using a Mac as my primary workstation. I received a Mac mini for Christmas, and after bumping it up to 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, the little $600 machine outshines my far more expensive Vaio notebook, and as far as the OS is concerned, I couldn’t be happier. I am able to take care of just about everything that I need to with it. With MacPorts, I have all my favorite Linux-type software available and it is nice that a lot of proprietary hardware just works on it, whereas on Linux sometimes it is a pain to get stuff working. Not that I don’t love the challenge. Of course I’m still running Linux on my server/media center, and couldn’t be happier with it, but in the future I think any notebook computer I buy will be an Apple. I’ll be staying with Linux for the media center, until there is something as good as MythTV or even MythTV itself running well on OS X. And by “as good as”, I mean it has to be free and open source.

That’s about all for now. Things are going pretty well. The weather is nice and stores are open on Sundays, so being back in the States is working out so far.

Linux on Compaq Presario F560US

Note: This is a long boring blog post. It details my frustration of getting this all to work. If you don’t care and just want to get to where I tell you exactly how to successfully install Linux on this computer, click here.

I haven’t done a tech post in quite a while, so here is one that will hopefully help someone out. A friend of mine recently got a new notebook computer, and the particular model was extremely inexpensive, but seemed to have decent specs regardless, at least for a Linux notebook. The Compaq Presario F500 series sports an NVidia graphics controller, a 1.8GHz AMD processor and 512MB of memory, which can be upgraded to 2GB. This seemed perfect to replace his aging Toshiba Satellite that we upgraded all the up to 512MB of memory and still barely putted along at ridiculously slow speeds, regardless of which operating system we put on there and attempted to optimize. So given the very low price of the new notebook, which was even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC’s, I recommended it. It came with Vista Basic Edition on it, but armed with a Linux disc, we were able to resolve that bug very quickly.

The timing coincided with Ubuntu’s 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release, so we decided to put that on there. It got about half way through loading the installer before it hung. Googling around through the Ubuntu Forums led to the conclusion that that particular version of Ubuntu wasn’t going to work very well. Most forum threads indicated that it would need some kernel boot parameters to function, namely “nolapic” and “noapic”. Well, these didn’t help us much further either. Most of the Google results were for the F500 series of notebooks, but perhaps the sub-model F560US was yet a little different. OpenSuse didn’t seem to want to load up either and the only operating system that would even install on this thing was Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. So we went with that, with the “nolapic noapic” boot parameters for GRUB.

In the meantime, I decided to switch from Gutsy Gibbon to OpenSuse 10.3 on my own notebook, since the KDE implementation of Gutsy seemed to have some pretty bad bugs in the network manager that were very annoying. My friend really liked the look and feel of Suse over Ubuntu, so he asked me if we could put it on his Presario. I figured it was worth another try, since I didn’t want him to be stuck with Ubuntu Feisty until the end of time on that brand new notebook. This past weekend I decided to tackle the project again to see what I could come up with. Faced again with the installer hanging at various points throughout the boot sequence, I found that what finally worked was adding “acpi=off noapic” to the kernel boot parameters in GRUB. I was all excited that it was working until I got the system all installed and set up and tried tackling the wireless card. The notebook has a Broadcom chipset of some sort normally sold in Dell notebooks, so there is plenty of documentation online about how to maybe get it to work with the native bcm43xx driver and extracted firmware from the Windows driver as well as many indications that NDiswrapper would work great. Lets just say that after many hours of trial and error and troubleshooting, I realized that having the “acpi=off” boot parameter was not going to allow the wireless card to function regardless of what driver I was using. After a few more hours of googling and trying every boot option that I could think of that had to do with IRQ and ACPI, it just would not boot at all without “acpi=off”. It was either no wireless or no booting at all with this thing. I decided to give up for the day. I gave my friend an ethernet cable and told him I would put Ubuntu Feisty back on there the next day for him. Of course, as most people that know me will tell you, I don’t give up easily when it comes to computers and I have a gut feeling that it should work.

I decided to start over from scratch with Ubuntu Gutsy again. Mostly because there is a lot of community documentation available for Ubuntu and I know the workings of a Debian system a little better than I do Suse and I figured I would install a command line only system and mess with it until I got it all working. If I could get Gutsy working on it, then I could use what I had learned to get OpenSuse 10.3 on it, like my friend wanted. Again I was able to successfully install and run the system by using the “acpi=off” boot parameter and again the wireless card couldn’t bind to IRQ0 with that setting and I was back at square one. But now I just had a command line system and was able to reboot quickly and get to testing really quickly with every different boot parameter and system setting I changed.

At some point I finally found the answer I was looking for. After literally just trying random boot parameters in conjunction with others and by themselves I discovered that the system boots AND runs AND the wireless card works if you use the following boot parameters:

noapic irqpoll nosmp

That was it. It worked great. I was able to bring up the wireless interface (so far didn’t have a working driver/firmware in there, but I didn’t get any more IRQ errors from dmesg) So I rebooted a few times, added the lines to GRUB permanently, installed the KDE desktop and ran a bunch of tests to see if I could get the system to hang. It didn’t. It worked like it was supposed to. So now back to installing OpenSuse. Well, I didn’t want to go through the entire Suse install process, which takes forever compared to Ubuntu just to find out that my boot parameters didn’t work for Suse, I decided to try the LiveCD that Suse has now. I booted it up (with my boot parameters) and it came up nicely. I was convinced that it would work, and as I was about to pop out the live CD and insert the install CD, I noticed that the Live CD had an “Install” option. I gave it a shot. It actually worked. Upon rebooting halfway through the install process, I added in the boot parameters again and when the system was finished I went into the Boot Loader settings in YaST and added the boot parameters in there. That way I don’t have to enter them each time I boot the computer. If you install using the regular installer CD, when the first menu comes up if you just add in the boot parameters, I think the installed system will remember them for you and you don’t have to edit anything in the YaST settings. I think the LiveCD has a few bugs that the regular install CD doesn’t have. I also had trouble enabling community repositories in YaST, which doesn’t seem to be an issue when you install using the regular CD.

One more thing I noticed: Don’t install the Broadcom firmware from YaST. In fact don’t install it at all. Blacklist the bcm43xx driver and use NDiswrapper. The bcm43xx driver, once the firmware is loaded, causes the entire system to slow down to a crawl and it doesn’t work. So, here is the install process for getting OpenSuse 10.3 working on a Compaq Presario F560US model:

Installation Guide

1. Insert CD and boot.
2. When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
3. Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
4. Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
5. While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
6. Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
7. Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:

su -

(enter your root password)

cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/

cd DRIVER/

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -m

echo blacklist bcm43xx >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules

reboot

Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.

Glühwein and Grog

I had a couple of pleasant surprises the past few days. A good friend of mine traveled all the way to Munich from Amsterdam to visit me on my birthday, and the following day a nice dinner and birthday cake was made for me. Yesterday we were walking through the Englischer Garten and it was a crisp cold foggy day. As we were walking, we came across a little stand selling drinks and snacks in the middle of the park. We were overwhelmed with joy, when we saw that their menu included Glühwein. Of course we had to stay and have a cup of it. An even greater surprise was when we were sitting and enjoying the Glühwein, when we took another look at the menu and realized that they had listed Grog!! Since we only know grog from old pirate tales, it was clear that we had to drink up the Glühwein and order some grog. It was actually extremely good and the perfect drink to accompany a cold day.