Python!

So I'm finally getting around to learning some python, my first programming language. So far nothings going over my head, guess I can thank all the reading I've done prior to this. Of course I should also get back to reading the drivers manual, I've put it off two years already.

Linux, my "anti-drug"

So while I was shopping with my Mom earlier today for some groceries I decided to buy a cheap USB drive while I was there. I have now spent the rest of the day loading various distros on it. My first attemt was with Fedora 9 since they had a easy GUI for creating the USB. Sadly though just as I was getting used to everything my USB drive froze, and subsecuently currupted some key file or other. Next stop was Damn Small Linux, really though it jsut not fit my needs. In other words I need something which looks a little better then MS98.

I am now going through the Pendrivelinux guide for getting Kubuntu 8.04 on my drive. I must say its very exiting, in the past 10 hours I have easy dopubled my knowledge of the Termal. Anyway I bets get back to my Termal session.

PS: Me in a few days?:

The white flag.

Well I'v given up, I can't seem to find a copy of the BIOs for me to edit. Nearly all of the guides I read talked about a .whp (Or something like that) sadly the BIOs update from HP is a .bin. I may try again in the future but for how I think I'll just phone HP to complain, who knows maybe they have a workaround. In fact I wonder how HP justifises having the whitelist even on laptops sold in
Canada.

Hacking the HP BIOs Wireless card whitelist.

So I bought a new wireless N card for my laptop. While I was waiting for it be get here I starting doing some reading. It turns out that HP, and IBM, use whitelists in their laptop BIOs to stop you from using any cards other then their overpriced ones. I was kind of hoping that since all the posts I was reading were for consumer HP laptops that I might be safe since I have a business Compaq 6715b.

No such luck. So now I'm trying the hack covered in these three pages:

www.richud.com/HP-Pavilion-104-Bios-Fix/
www.rechner.org/b1800_bios.html
www.paul.sladen.org/thinkpad-r31/wifi-card-pci-ids.html

Now as much as I'm looking forward to this learning experience I am very tempted to go the easy route and see if I can't just edit my wireless card's ID. In fact the Richud site even gives a link as to how to do this, sadly though it 404's.

PS: For those increased I'm trying to install a SparkLAN WPEA-124N.

Edit: This seems to be the link that was 404'ing. I think I'll try to add my card to the whitelist first since I don't want to run into any problems with linux drivers when I do boot into linux.