A wireless add-on

One thing I found that seemed to be missing from Ubuntu was a good way to connect to whatever wireless networks were around. Out of the box, you boot up and it connects to your wireless network. In a perfect world, this would work great. But this doesn't work on a laptop. I plan on going to different places with this thing.

So, a post to the forums, and I get pointed to gtkWifi. This thing is just like the wireless tool in XP, but it allows you to store the keys to multiple networks and select them automatically. I have only this one network that I will connect to on a regular basis, so I can't test this.

It comes as a .deb package, so it was easy to install. Launch a terminal and do:

dpckg --install package.deb

It installed just right. It even automatically put it into the "other" menu. This is just too simple. It will just take a short time for Linux to be really main stream once people really look at this distro.

Got an alternate desktop environment

While I was playing around with Zenwalk, I found that I like XFCE as an alternative. I don't know if I would use it full time or not, but I like having alternatives. So I was pleased to get a reply to my question on the Ubuntu forums. Seems that there is a project to make XFCE the default window manager. There's even talk about there being a Xubuntu distro. It looks like they will be launching that soon, maybe on the next release.

But to get mine working for me, I made use of Synaptic. All I had to do was select the xubuntu-desktop application and it loaded up just fine. It even pulled up all the other packages that had to be loaded. I could have used apt-get also. To do that, I would do this:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

I also logged into my course today and found that I would have to use XP for part of it. They have several applications that I have to load. I could try using Wine, but I don't want to use this as a test to if I can do this.

But I also found that I wasn't able to use RealPlayer to play the audio clips in class. So I had to do some searching. Found it on the Ubuntu WIKI page. Down in there, there's the steps to load up RealPlayer. Basically, you download the .DEB file and then do the following.

cd /
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
sudo dpkg -i realplayer_.deb

That was it. It even configured the system to use RealPlayer as the default for .rm files. This is easier than I though it would be. I originally had issues with the libstdc++ file. This took care of that. It's going to get easier once I find out how to best use Synaptic and apt-get.

Pretty it up

Wanted to pretty up the desktop and wasn't happy with the gDesklets, so looked into aDesklets. First I need to install the engine. I downloaded this and extracted it with

tar xvjf adesklets-version

Then into the directory to install with a ./configure. First problem is apparently Ubuntu doesn't install with the developer programs. A quick Google search and I found the answer to this. I did a

sudo apt-get install build-essential

It installed just fine. Attempted another ./configure and got:

checking for Python include path... find: /usr/include/python/: No such file or directory

I thought that maybe Python didn't install, so I:

sudo apt-get install python2.4

But the system said it was up to date. I looked at the error again and looked into the /usr/include directory and found that the Python directory is python24, created a symbolic link with:

ln -s ./python24 ./python

I ran ./congfigure again and received:

checking for Python include path...
configure: error: cannot find Python include path

I posted to the adesklet forums, but haven't received a message back yet. I've come up with a couple other problems. I need to set up the funtion keys. I found a forum post on the Gentoo forums for the Sony FS series Function Key fix. I also need to set the system up to shut down when I hit the power button.

Let's try Ubuntu

I'd been playing around with Zenwalk for a little while. I really like it, but I'm having issues getting it configured to use the wireless card properly. After reinstalling it I can't even see the network card. So, I decided to give another distro a try. I've heard that Ubuntu is pretty good, so decided to give that a try. I happened to have a Live CD version and booted that. To my surprise, it came right up and I was surfing on my network. I still don't have any security working, but it's on-line.

Now to try loading it to the hard drive. The installer is a piece of cake. There's virtually nothing that the user has to know. But since I wanted to run in a dual boot configuration, that's not what I did. The installer didn't have anything for me to pick, so I chose to manually configure the partitions. I kept my FAT32 partition to allow sharing between Windows and Linux. I also told it about my NTFS partition, but I've since learned that I can't access this device from a regular account. My Swap partition was already defined, so I kept that, and I defined a big chunk of the disk for /home. There's still another 10 gig partition that I can load up another distro, and I think I'll probably be using Zenwalk on there, but I first will have to learn about GRUB.

After setting up the partition, I accepted the defaults thru the rest of the installer. It sort of rebooted and finished the install. During the rest of the install, I saw that I had an error that said:

4295021.489000J IPW2200: Firmware error detected

Obviously this is my wireless card. This was a little disheartening because the Live CD handled my wireless just fine. After booting up, I didn't have any wireless, so I had to reboot into XP to figure out where the firmware is kept. I booted again into Ubuntu to fix this problem. I had already downloaded the latest firmware and I untarred that into the /lib/hotplug/firmware directory using

tar xfzv ipw2200-fw-2.4.tgz

I rebooted and it recognized my wireless. But I still didn't have any Internet access. I did an iwconfig and found I was associated with fritznet but when I did an ifconfig, I didn't have an IP address. Obviously the card wasn't set up to use DHCP. So, I clicked on System >> Administration >> Networking, then selected my wireless card and the rest was simple. Everything is really easy to configure. I also found that I can set up a different location on this system. After getting this set up, I created a home location. I then connected to my router and configured it to use WEP. I copied the key from the browser and created a home-wep location. This location is set up using WEP, obviously. This way to doing this will allow me to use the plain home location when I'm travelling or in a public hot spot.

I also found that it recognizes the USB flash drive as soon as I put it in. That was a great buy. No need to worry about my files anymore.

I don't like how the other drives are named. I will need to change my /etc/fstab to pull the ntfs partition out. I changed /etc/fstab to name the FAT32 partition to /fat32. I haven't figured out how to put a shortcut to the directory on the desktop. I'll have to play around with that.

I found that the computer would not reboot, shutdown or hibernate. While I was playing around the Update Manager popped up and found all the updates that I needed. This upgraded my kernel to 2.6.10. I don't know if this fixed the shutdown problem or not because I also found a link where it described how to fix this problem. The other thing I did was this:

# sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then in the file, I changed the kernel line for the Kernel I was using from

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/hda5 ro noapic nolapic quiet splash

to

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/hda5 ro quiet splash

There's really not that much more that I need to configure. If Linux goes this way, it will become mainstream. This is so easy to configure.

I really like that it automatically puts the battery monitor on the top bar. I do need to learn how to use Gnome, though. I don't know where the various config items are located. It's not hard to find it, but I do want to know where they are. It's really cool to do this. I also think that my display is showing correctly.

I'm sure I'll find stuff that I don't like, but not yet. So far it's really good. One thing I do need to do is configure my system to hide my real MAC address. I found an article that walked through setting this up on a Slackware system, but I don't know about Ubuntu.