Hello faithful friends and readers. I'm sorry that we have ignored you for so long. I didn't think this would ever become the kind of blog that included apologies for not blogging, but here it is.
We have some wonderful missionary friends in South America and North Africa who we would love to talk more easily with. For this reason I've been working on making our main computer ready to
Skype (free Internet phone). If you've read our blog or know us, you probably know that we tend to do things the hard way. Sometimes it's for fun, sometimes it's ethical, sometimes it's economic, sometimes it's just stubbornness, etc. Thus I only use
linux for an operating system (for all of the above reasons). Skype has versions for linux, but the version of
Debian linux I was running on our main computer was too old. Having had great success with
Ubuntu linux on my ibook, I decided to give it a try on our Dell.
The problem I always have with my desktop is getting the operating system to talk to the Motorola (Broadcom) wireless card I installed. The card uses proprietary windows drivers that any distribution of linux can't legally release with their OS. The first time around, I used a program called
NDISwrapper to extract the necessary stuff from the windows driver (found on my wireless card installation CD). This time all of the distributions of Linux came with this program called
bw43-fwcutter. It was supposed to do something like NDISwrapper, but it didn't work for me. In fact neither of these programs could I get to work with the newest versions of Debian or Ubuntu. In my despairation, I tried some different distributions and ended up getting NDISwrapper to work in
openSUSE.
So after more than a month, The Full Cup is back! I also got a new camera for my birthday, which will add to the visual happiness of this blog
Heres' to a bright future of good frequent posting.
We recently got back from the most wonderful trip to the woods of Western Wisconsin. We love this place. It's the landscape I grew up in and Libby grew up visiting. Now our boys can enjoy it too. We may have more to say about specific adventures from this trip, but for now enjoy a slide show.