See, there are a hell of a lot of Lance Corporals in the Marines. You go in a private (you’re a private when you’re a recruit, they just don’t call you that), and you get PFC (I think it’s) 6 months after the day you went into boot, then Lance Corporal another 6 or 9 months, I forget which. After that, you have to start earning it. So, like I said, there are a hell of a lot of Lance Corporals in the Marine Corps.
Since we’re all nonrates (e.g., not NCOs), we can all pretty much talk to each other like human beings, and since none of us ever know what the hell’s going on at the upper levels, the one guy who happened to be taking out the trash at the moment the First Sergeant said “we’re getting out early on Friday” feels compelled to tell everyone.
We call it “the Lance Corporal Underground”. And it’s usually wildly inaccurate. We might as well be asking Miss Cleo what’s on the agenda for the unit next week.
Someone took this a step further and took it online.
I thought it was hilarious.
Yes, I finally broke down and bought a new laptop, with my <in-joke>fat Marine Corps paycheck</in-joke>.
It’s running Ubuntu Edgy, after a seemingly endless series of forced dist-upgrades from Feisty. I’ll be posting my experiences with it in a seperate section, since I seem to be the first Linux user to have bought the damned thing.
So far: ethernet works out of the box. The wireless card, a Realtek 8187B, needs a quick hack to the driver source, which I’ve detailed here. Sound and the modem are big question marks. I get 1280×800 with Xorg and the fglrx module. Synaptics touchpad works as expected.
More to come.
I got the drivers for the RTL8187B straight from Realtek, who was nice enough to respond to my email. However, when I compiled it and insmodded it under the Ubuntu live CD, it barfed out with an “Unknown RF chip” error.
After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to get it to work: my card’s USB product ID is 0×8197, and it’s functionally identical to product ID 0×8189. All you have to do is go into rtl8187/r8187_core.c, and around line 2837, change
case 0x8189:
to
case 0x8197:
case 0×8189:
Works like a champ.
That said, why, WHY would you make the onboard NIC in a laptop a USB device? Why?
[EDIT] Drivers are at http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/. Please read the README there, since I’ve made further changes since writing this post.
