[ale] clear? Cloudy?

[Brian MacLeod]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Grady Harris <nolan.voight at gmail.com>wrote:

> An older friend, whose technical competence is medical, not
> mechanical, has an older Toshiba laptop that had become unusable under
> WIndows. When "The Geeks," as she kept calling them, couldn't get it
> working, she brought it into the library, & asked me if I could rescue
> her files. I did so, with a LiveCD, which delighted & impressed her,
> so we tried a few distros. The one that worked best within the limits
> of the memory--128 Mb--w/ sufficient visual help to be useful for her
> turned out to be zenwalk.
>
> She's been very happy with it, called me from a couple of conference &
> airports in other cities to get walked through getting the wireless up
> again, but it has always, to my amazement, ended up working. Now,
> however, she has signed up for Clear wimax. I have no experience of
> that, either. Any of y'all had any success? Please tell me it's no
> problem.
>


I have Clear, but I will also admit I'm not much of a programmer and I
haven't spent a lot of time looking, but my understand of the state of
affairs is as follows:

The Motorola USB device uses Beceem chipsets.  Beceem is currently not
playing nice with developers by holding back the specs.  As it is, stable
Mac drivers are still in development, which is something I am waiting on
(though I am about to try the betas for the hell of it).  However, Intel's
WiMAX goodies are being actively developed under Linux, but, these are
mostly mini-PCI cards, which I suspect this laptop probably doesn't have.
Obviously ExpressCard is not even an option.

There has been some talk of USB->mini-PCI adaptor devices out there, which
would potentially allow the use of the Intel cards with any machine equipped
with USB.  I didn't know this technology even existed, but I haven't done a
lot of research to vet it.

The home unit "modem" has an ethernet out the back, so it will work with
anything that speaks 802.3.

She's going to have issues unless she puts something in between her laptop
and the device, or replacing the device with something more linux friendly.
Not enough questions were asked when the service was bought.

bnm
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