Hmm, reading up on the big Apple hardware announcement on Tuesday I have to say I’m disappointed. I was really hoping for an OS X powered netbook. Instead what we have now is a so-called pro laptop with a shiny screen. Oh and if you want a small form factor laptop with firewire then you’re SOL because the MacBook only has USB2 in the new models.

Reading the various comments on TUAW the fanboy response of “if you want firewire buy a pro” is quite spectacularly idiotic. If your laptop is your only computer then fine, go pro. I however, already have a desktop, I don’t need another all singing all dancing workhorse, and 15 inch laptops are not very mobile. The MacBook is too expensive to be missing such a key port. I don’t mind that my Eee PC only does USB, it cost less than £300, it’s not designed to be used solo. A MacBook is, or was.

I’m seriously questioning my commitment to using Apple computers. I’ve already given up waiting for a netbook for this round of my laptop upgrade cycle with the purchase of the Eee. Currently I work on a white 20 inch iMac, what do I do if that breaks? Suck it up and buy a shiny screened iMac? Nope, I remember the nightmare of shiny CRTs too clearly. What about a Mac Pro? I design websites, I don’t operate mission control, 8 cores is overkill for my needs. And an £1800 starting price? Forget it. So it looks like either I join the dark side and get used to Windows or I switch to Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu on my Eee and I’m impressed with it. It even runs Photoshop. Then there’s always VirtualBox to run anything that isn’t covered on linux.

I finally got a distribution of Linux to successfully install on my Vaio. No problems with detecting the CD-ROM drive, screen sets up automatically and wifi works. I’m documenting the process as a record so I don’t forget.

Hardware

• Sony Vaio PCG-C1MGP
• CD-ROM drive PCGA-CD51/A
• Netgear MA521 PCMCIA

Step 1

Download the Alternate install CD of Feisty Fawn as the Vaio only has 128mb of RAM.

Step 2

Wipe the Vaio hard disk, I’m going to use the laptop mostly for web development so Windows is pretty much useless to me.

Step 3

Next install the following using Synaptic Package Manager

• ndiswrapper-common
• ndiswrapper-source
• ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Now download the Windows XP drivers for the Netgear card. Extract and copy NET8180.inf and rtl8180.sys onto a flash drive and copy to the Vaio.

Open a teminal window and type:
sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/drivers/drivername.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Then open System > Network and configure the network settings then activate the connection.