I Totally Fail at User Support
Category Administration Diversion
The laptop's wi-fi is dead, and I'm working on the phone to coach my Dad through some basic diagnostics. I set up the laptop, it's a Lenovo N2000 running Ubuntu 8.04 and it's been working great. Well, it was until the internal wi-fi mysteriously stopped working.
I walked my Father through opening a console and entering "lshw -C network" (there is no way I was going to ask him to read out from lsmod). Nothing worked, the command wasn't recognized. I re-spelled the commands as if it was a military alphabet. No luck. Is something horribly wrong ? Why isn't "lshw" returning anything ?
Eventually, the laptop was boxed, shipped 3,000 miles, and I had it running within 20 minutes. Now, between you an me, the problem was easy to solve, but its resolution is not the purpose of my post. After all, you'd expect me to tell how smart I am at solving Linux laptop problems. How about if, instead, I tell you how dumb I am at working with user support.
My technical disconnect was over the spelling of the commands. You and I know that Linux is case sensitive, but it's not obvious to the casual computer user. I had been thwarted by upper and lowercase.
The laptop's wi-fi is dead, and I'm working on the phone to coach my Dad through some basic diagnostics. I set up the laptop, it's a Lenovo N2000 running Ubuntu 8.04 and it's been working great. Well, it was until the internal wi-fi mysteriously stopped working.
I walked my Father through opening a console and entering "lshw -C network" (there is no way I was going to ask him to read out from lsmod). Nothing worked, the command wasn't recognized. I re-spelled the commands as if it was a military alphabet. No luck. Is something horribly wrong ? Why isn't "lshw" returning anything ?
Eventually, the laptop was boxed, shipped 3,000 miles, and I had it running within 20 minutes. Now, between you an me, the problem was easy to solve, but its resolution is not the purpose of my post. After all, you'd expect me to tell how smart I am at solving Linux laptop problems. How about if, instead, I tell you how dumb I am at working with user support.
My technical disconnect was over the spelling of the commands. You and I know that Linux is case sensitive, but it's not obvious to the casual computer user. I had been thwarted by upper and lowercase.
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Comments
Posted by Tim Lorge At 03:31:52 AM On 09/28/2008 | - Website - |