| My LinuxWorld Winter Wonderland ordeal |
Feb. 21, 2007
So, there I was in Dulles, the most annoying airport I know, waiting for a flight to LaGuardia last week to get to the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit. And, I waited, and waited, and...
Flying through Washington DC when there's a snowflake in radar range is always a chancy business. If there's half-an-inch of snow in Pittsburgh -- several hundred miles to the West -- greater DC residents start storming stores for "blizzard" supplies and screaming about the unfairness of being kept in the office instead of being released to go home. I know. I lived in and around DC for over 15 years.
Thus, I wasn't too surprised when Dulles closed down. I was annoyed, since an earlier flight had been canceled for no good reason, but not surprised. Hours and days later, I still couldn't get a flight to NYC. When Dulles was finally open, the New York airports were closed.
I should have taken Amtrak, the only good way to travel the northeast corridor, but by the time I looked into trains, they were booked solid.
There's more to the tale, but you get the point. I never got within a hundred miles of LinuxWorld.
What was it like? Well, despite the weather, I'm told that a good number of people made it to the show, and did a lot of wheeling and dealing about Linux and open source. This was not a show like SCALE 5X or Ohio Linux Fest for people who love Linux. This was a show for people who love to make money from selling, supporting, or using Linux.
As my friend Robin "Roblimo" Miller reported, with several videos, the people who did make it to the show -- through the snow, ice, and perhaps a howling wolf or two -- actually had a very good time. I just wish I could have been there.
I did write some stories even though I spent my time either stuck at the airport proper, or a nearby Hilton hotel. I was able to do that thanks to my IBM T40 ThinkPad.
On that system, I run MEPIS 6.01. It's based on a 1.6GHz Pentium M processor with 1MB of L2 cache, and a 400MHz FSB (Front Side Bus). For main memory it comes with 512MBs of DDR SDRAM memory, and a built-in ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 AGP 4x with 32MB of VRAM for graphics.
The T40s came from IBM with one of three different WiFi cards in a miniPCI slot. In my case, I have the Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter. Because I like to have laptops with the maximum possible range -- you never know when you're going to be far, far away from a WiFi access point -- I've supplemented it with a NetGear RangeMax WPN511 PC Card. This is an excellent 802.11g card, and like the name says, it's got great range. Thanks to that, and MadWifi, the open-source project devoted to supporting WiFi cards, like the WPN511, that are based on the Atheros chipset family, I had no trouble staying connected.
That, by the way, was not a small thing. With an overcrowded airport, I saw many Windows laptop users swearing under their breath as they were unable to get or maintain WiFi connections.
Another plus is that while the T40 line was always known for doing well with battery life, it seemed to do especially well with MEPIS. I've no scientific proof but I couldn't help noticing that I kept working several times in the airport long after near-by Windows users slammed their laptops shut in disgust as they beeped their battery's last gasps.
There are three morals to this story. The first is that Linux -- and MEPIS in particular -- makes a great business laptop operating system. The second is to try to get laptops with not just good, but outstanding WiFi performance, and excellent battery life. And, last but probably the one I'll remember best, never, ever take a flight with a connection in Dulles in the winter.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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