My Grandfather has been enjoying the internet via his 133MHz computer and his 56k modem for years, but recently for his 80th birthday as a family we bought him some components to build him a new computer with a nice new 4GHz processor and flat screen, because his old computer was truly useless.

To celebrate his new pc, he thought he would take up Virgin Media on their offer of broadband for only £9.99 a month. So he picks up the phone and calls their customer phone line to get it set up, the first bad sign was when he was on the phone to the sales rep:

Sales Rep : What manufacturer is your machine made by?

Grandfather : My son made it for me

Sales Rep : Ok……What Operating System does it run?

Grandfather : Ubuntu

Sales Rep : No, What Operating System does it run?

Grandfather : Ubuntu

Sales Rep : No, no, no…………Is it a brand new machine?

Grandfather : Yes, brand new.

Sales Rep : Well that should be fine then.

Clearly the Sales Rep doesnt even have a clue as to what Ubuntu is, let alone him knowing it is a linux distro. He also seems to believe that just because its a new machine it should come loaded with Vista, which is what Virgin Media Recomend, even though they don’t say that you can’t use anything else.

Now in my house we got NTL ages ago, and so we still one of their old modems, so we believe that it should be a piece of cake installing this new modem onto his computer as its just a matter of pluging in an ethernet cable. But no, it seems that when Virgin and NTL merged they changed their systems, so it turns now you need to plug in the modem AND install their software onto your computer, so that you can type in your password, to connect to the internet.

So the “engineer” (I use that word loosely due to past experience with NTL “engineers”) turns up this morning at my Grandfather’s house to install the modem, which he does by unpacking it from the box and plugging the cable into the back. He then asks about the computer, which my Grandfather tells him runs on Ubuntu. He doesn’t even bother to turn it on and just leaves an install CD and a User Guide.

My Grandfather then has some troubles setting this up and phones me, so I go over this afternoon and try to help him. After turning on the computer I try some quick pinging with well known websites such as bbc.co.uk and google.com, and they all work. So I expect to be able to load either in Firefox, thus I load up Firefox and much to my surprise nothing happens. I check the pinging again, and that is all fine, but the browser won’t load anything.

A quick browse of the User Guide suggests why, in it says that you have to enter your user name and password into the software. It would seem that Virgin Media have some sort of port blocker active until you enter your user name and password. One slight problem with this however……the software is designed to run on windows and so won’t work on Ubuntu. So now even though my Grandfather has done nothing wrong and has even specifically told Virgin Media several times he has Ubuntu, he can’t use his new broadband connection he has paid for. All due to Virgin Media’s incompetence.

Anyone know how to get this working? I’m thinking of using Wine, but would that work? As I noticed the CD had drivers on it. Obviously there is no point in calling Virgin Media tech support as they are going to be as useless as a Chocolate Teapot!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under General Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.