great day for me...

A few days ago a friend of mine managed to install, after a couple of false starts, Mandriva 2008 on his desktop all by himself.  Which means he is more techie than he claims to be, or Linux really is getting easier :-)

And today, he managed to get a PCI wireless card (WG311) working using ndiswrapper.  Without using the command line!  And my only contribution was to give him the names of the files that constitute the Windows drivers.

In other words, Mandriva has become that easy to use :-)  This is so totally awesome, because if a device needs ndiswrapper, it means the manufacturer has not released enough specs for the open source folks to write a driver for it, so you are forced to use the Windows drivers somehow.  This sort of stuff does not always work as expected, plus we were using the Mandriva Free DVD (the "priced" one would have done all this automatically anyway).

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I am so glad it was not possible for me to go to his home and install it my way :-)  If I'd been able to do that, we'd never have known how easy the GUI really is, which is really, really, important for evangelism!