Author: Rene

We bought our Honda CR-V back in September of 2000 just before the 2001’s hit the lot. We worked out a deal with the dealership and had our CR-V delivered to us a little while later.

Before our CR-V’s factory warranty was up we purchased a 6 year, 160,000km warranty from Honda for around $1200. It turns out to be money well spent.

On March 17th, 2006 we had a bunch of stuff replaced under the warranty. Front passenger upper control arm (ball joint was gone), front links and bushings, rear links and bushings and both rear trailing arms. Total cost to me would have been around $1500 but with the extended warranty I only had to pay the deductibles which ended up being around $150. We also replaced both rear struts with a set of aftermarket ‘Gabriel’ struts from CarQuest as these weren’t covered under the warranty.

Last Wednesday night, March 29th 2006 on our way to St. Alban’s we started hearing a new knocking noise. Only very occasionally at first, but within 10 minutes the CR-V started knocking with every little bump. I figured a rock must be stuck bouncing around the driveshaft. A couple days later when it stopped raining I got the CR-V up on jack stands and crawled underneath. No rock to be found but I did noticed oil leaking from the power steering rack. We then checked the fluid level and it was down a little, but far from being dried out. After pulling off both front tires and not finding anything loose or bouncing around I called Honda and setup an appointment for another visit.

Today Siobhan took the two hour drive to the dealership and had the CR-V looked at. It ends up that the driver side ball joint now needs to be replaced and the power steering rack has to be replaced. On top of all this one of the two NEW rear struts has already leaked out. The rack can’t be air shipped for some reason or another so we have to wait until at least next week for it to come in so that means another trip to Gander (approximately 240 kms each way) to get the work done. Keep in mind that during all of this Siobhan is just about ready to give birth to our child (due in 11 days). Our CR-V has about 147,000 kms on it and therefore only about 13,000kms of extended warranty left. The upper control arm and power steering rack are both covered under the warranty but I will have a little battle with the struts for sure. I hope that anything else that may go wrong does soon so we get everything replaced before the warranty is up.

Honda is being very good about all of this and the dealership is quite accomodating. Hopefully all will be good in a week or so.

Rene

I finally got the time to install Linux on my home PC last night. I choose Ubuntu Linux (Linux for Human Beings) 5.10. The install was relatively painless. I had to do the disk partitioning on my own to setup a dual boot system so that was a little more advanced but if someone wanted to set it up on a empty hard drive they shouldn’t have any issues.

This morning I got up and decided to have a little play with Ubuntu to see how easy it was to use. The first thing I notice is that Firefox (web browser) was an older version. I wanted to update it. When using Windows, I simply went to www.mozilla.com, clicked on the download link, ran it and the update was a simple matter of clicking next a few times.

Not so with Linux. The download was easy enough. I saved the file to my desktop. Now what?

First of all, what’s a .tar.gz file and what do I do with this “Archive Manager” program now that’s I’ve double clicked on the Firefox file? The file had a .tar.gz extension that I recognized as a compressed archive, much like .zip files in Windows. I have used Linux many times before, and I have a SmoothWall Linux based firewall at work that I configured and have made many modifications to, so I realized that this update of FireFox might require some console action. Here’s where the problems would start for almost everybody who is a Windows user.

I then visited the www.ubuntu.com site, found the forums, and did a search for “update firefox”. When I found the information I was looking for my jaw almost hit the floor.

Here are the links I found:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirefoxNewVersion
This one is flawed from the beginning. Picture a Linux Newbie reading this page. The first thing they are told to do is “sudo apt-get install libstdc++5”. OK, what the heck does that mean? Do I type is somewhere? This page then goes on with many things you are supposed to ype, but makes no mention anywhere that you are supposed to type this stuff in. Even if someone realized they were supposed to type it, where do they type it?

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=137243
This one is a lot better. It actually explains what to do, which program to run in Linux and it explains what each command does. It is still quite scary looking to Linux newbies, and unfortunately for me, I didn’t find it until after I went through the step by step method in the first link above. Fortunately I didn’t need to worry about all the steps as I didn’t have any settings that I needed moved over to the new Firefox. Unfortunately, many newbies probably wouldn’t realize this by looking at the instructions.

There is also another method that I discovered that might be easy for newbies, I haven’t had time to try it out yet, but it sounds promising. Automatix can be found at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=138405. The instructions for installing Automatix are on this page as well and it seems to be very easy.

So to all those that preach the Linux gospel, please realize that this OS needs to be more user friendly! It shouldn’t be this hard to install applications.

Later,
Rene

edit: I tried to install Automatix following the instructions. Right away I got a permission denied error message. I had to add a sudo before the first command so that it now read: “sudo wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb”

edit 2: Automatix is the answer! With two lines entered in the terminal I had a program installed that gave me a simple way to install new software (that was supported by Automatix). The two lines were:
sudo wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb
Be sure to check out the thread on Automatix linked above!

edit3: I think this comment that was left sums up what my title states pretty good:

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Posted by Danny at April 4, 2006 02:13 PM