Amazing Ubuntu 8.10

For years and years and years I searched for a usable version of Linux.  Until recently, the closest thing was SUSE 11.  But things have changed recently, I tried Ubuntu again, and it’s frickin amazing.  This blog entry catalogs my continuing amazements and a few frustrations:

Amazements

• Installing stuff is sooooo easy.  I just type sudo apt-get install and it’s done!
• Ubuntu’s wireless connection manager sees all the wireless networks in my neighborhood.  It even lets me easily connect to the one in my house!  Red Hat and Mandriva didn’t do that.
• I wanted to print a document today.  I marched up to my HP printer, plugged in the USB cable, and within two minutes Ubuntu said the printer was ready to use.  Then I just printed my document.  Imagine that.  Not even Windows ever automagically recognized the exact printer model and got it all configured and ready for me to use.
• I used to always prefer the KDE desktop.  But the Ubuntu folks have done such a fine job of picking good Gnome apps and making them play nice together, that I’m happy to use the Gnome desktop.  KDE really shot themselves in the foot with the premature release of KDE verison 4.  It was unstable and it lost hours of my work (even though my work was saved).
• The Rhythmbox music player works great.  I right click on songs in the file browser and open and play them!
• The BitTorrent client Deluge works as good as uTorrent.
• The file compression utility built-in to the Nautilus file browser understands every compression format I know of, even my favorite 7zip.
• Ubuntu automatically mounts NTFS USB hard drives.  I can even copy files to NTFS drives without corrupting the disk like SUSE did.  SUSE also won’t automount an NTFS drive without manually editing the fstab file.  What were they thinking?
• The screen graphics, font crispness, and refresh speed on Ubuntu is acceptable.  Some how Red Hat fonts looked best on my Dell LCD and ThinkPad screens.  Odd that a server oriented distribution would do that.  SUSE’s fonts (for a long, long time) have look dreadful on LCD screens.  For some odd reason, they go the extra mile to make text look very unpleasant on LCDs.

Frustrations

• Whenever I startup Ubuntu or resume from hibernation, I’m asked for the password to a keyring where it stored my wireless network password.  Ubuntu didn’t ask me to save my wireless password to a keyring, it just did it.   It really should’ve asked, so I could say NO.  Windows is much nicer, it just lets me use my wireless connection.  I don’t know why Ubuntu makes it so hard.  I did some research and this problem has plagued Ubuntu for several releases.  They claim to have fixed it, but clearly they didn’t.
• Because it’s the first Linux distribution that might actually free me from Microsoft, I want to give Ubuntu some money.  I want them to be successful.  But the only way I can see on their web site to give them money, is to pay $250 for a year’s worth of technical support.  Well, I like Ubuntu, but not that much.  I only want to give them $50.  If it keeps improving, I’ll give them $50 next year too.  But I see no way to do it on their web site.  They’re throwing away money by not having a “Donate” button.

• VMWare and Ubuntu’s preferred virtualization application, KVM, barely coexist.  My battery ran out while VMWare was running.  When I restored power, VMWare could not run because KVM was auto-loaded when Ubuntu started.  Somehow, during the crash, KVM retook control of the “…virtualization capabilities of my computer…”,  which meant no other virtual machine app could run.  This happened even after I had completely uninstalled all KVM packages.  I think it’s fine for Ubuntu to choose a virtualization application and even compile it into the Linux kernel.  I just wish they’d provide a straight forward way for a mere mortal to stop/remove it.  I ended up reinstalling VMWare, which was able to flip some magic switch to prevent KVM from loading.  

Wireless Linux 3 of 3

I’m happy to report that I finally got my Linux box hooked up to the internet! This was made possible with the DLink DWL 820G wireless adapter. I ended up completely by-passing the frustrating mess that is Linux wireless drivers (lots of information on the internet: mostly incomplete, mostly outdated, and most likely works only on narrow range of hardware and Linux distros). Mere mortals may want to avoid this time & money sink hole and proceed directly to a solution like the DLink DWL 820G, which relies on Linux’s excellent Ethernet card support and has a high chance of success.

Wireless Linux 2 of 3

Today I retraced my steps for installing a driver for my MSI PC60G card. Still the card wasn’t recognized. Being a lazy sort of guy, I decided to see if another Linux distribution might succeed where I’d failed.

I installed Xubuntu desktop and SUSE 10.2, but neither had built in support for my card. Each also had serious problems with my Dell E207 20″ LCD monitor. SUSE had the bottom menu bar off the screen and no way to access it! Xubuntu only allowed a maximum screen resolution of 800×600. Since I was already struggling with one driver problem, I didn’t want to take on another by trying to find the right Linux driver for my graphics card. So I reinstalled Centos5, which at least displays nicely on my monitor.

During the Centos5 reinstall I had a good idea. While my current Linux expertise is lacking, maybe I can connect my Dell C521 to the local wireless network strictly via a hardware solution. DLink has an ethernet-to-wireless bridge called the DWL 820G. It can receive wireless signals and send them down an ethernet cable into my C521! It supports WPA/TKIP security. I just ordered it from Newegg for about $63.

Wireless Linux 1 of 3

I live in a mother-in-law apartment. I share a broadband connection with my landlord via wifi. I want to use Linux more at home because I need to know it better at work. My Linux box is a cheap Dell C521.

I’m trying to get the wireless card in my C521 to work with Centos5 Linux. I bought an MSI PC60G wireless card from Newegg.com, based on price, good reviews, and user comments saying it worked on Linux. I was hoping it would “just work”. Once I got the card I found out Centos5 doesn’t support it by default. Drats.

Comments at Newegg said I to get a driver at SerialMonkey for my RaLink RT2561 based card. That site has a How-To for Centos4. The How-To said to compile the driver from source, which required development rpms, such as: binutils, cpp, m4, make, perl, glibc, autoconf, gcc, glibc-devel, glibc-headers. Several files in the How-To don’t seem to exist in Centos5, such as perl-Filter and glibc-kernheaders. I found the replacement for one of them: kernel-headers.

The next step was compiling and installing the driver according the instructions in it’s readme file. Although the compile succeeded, there were warnings about “clock skew”. Turns out the system clock was some how set to about 1 year in the past. I set the correct date-time and recompiled with no big warnings. But there were grumblings about “Including config.h is deprecated”, but I don’t think these should affect anything. My understanding is that this would install a rt2500 driver file to a dir where Linux looked for drivers.

Next step was to create a config file under /etc/Wireless/RT2500STA/RT2500STA.dat based on the template provided with Serial Monkey download. In it I specified the SSID and security params for my wireless network. This step wasn’t in the How-To but was in the driver’s README file. I restarted the computer after this.

Next I wanted to see if Centos5 saw the card and/or driver. Using lspci shows the card. But the card/driver is not mentioned in /etc/sysconfig/hwconf. Drats. Centos is not seeing the driver file or cannot associate it to the MSI card.

I’m stuck at this point using the SerialMonkey driver. What’s my next step? Should I continue down this path or try using NDIS wrapper?