The Linux Extremist

After I completed a trial of PC BSD on one of my desktop machines, I was looking forward to moving it over to Fedora Core 5. Then I discovered something which stayed my hand; apparently wireless support for Fedora Core 5 is quite weak. Unlike Ubuntu and PC BSD, it does not come with the Madwifi drivers for Atheros cards as standard. There are plenty of how-tos, but the problem is that if wireless is the only connection one has for a particular machine, you’re fairly stuck - most require downloading drivers, through a connection that is more deus ex machina than anything practical.

Frustrated, I thought about moving to OpenSuse instead. After all, I’d used Suse before and never had this problem. However since version 10.1, Suse is moving backwards in this regard, there is no in-built support for Atheros cards.

This is disappointing, particularly since Ubuntu’s support for Atheros cards is perfect.  It also exposes the one Achilles heel of many Linux distributions; while it is outstanding in most ways, support for wireless still remains a problem.

With the rise of wireless internet and the increasing use of laptops, one would think that development teams would be pushing onward towards greater compatibility with a variety of wireless chipsets, not removing support for cards which have long had that support.  However, some distributions seem to disregard wireless almost entirely: for example, Fedora Core’s support is extremely poor. So far as I can tell, they solely support the Intel Centrino chipset “out of the box”.  This is maddening as Fedora’s support for everything else from sound cards and graphics cards is outstanding.

Fortunately, the team at Ubuntu is much more clued up about such things; their wireless support, which was always good, appears to be improving over time.  This may partially explain why Ubuntu is now the most popular distribution; it involves no ripping of hair out in order to enjoy the full benefits of wireless networking.  The developers of PC BSD also appear to understand this; while BSD’s support for wireless chipsets is still fairly narrow (they support Intel Centrino wireless and Atheros) at least this is more than what Fedora Core has on offer.

I suggest that developers working on Fedora and OpenSuse need to realise that the Linux Revolution could be hindered by a refusal to tackle this issue.  Not everyone wants to hack around with their machine merely to get onto the internet.  It will deter the nervous.  Or it may just mean that the future will belong to Ubuntu.

I could redefine the word “livid” today. I am riding on a lava floe of anger, bubbling and fuming with sulfurous rage. The name of my pain is MS SQL; and the cause of my fury is that it doesn’t play well with others.

My company’s website is in the midst of a transition; my predecessor, rather stupidly, decided that the company was going to go with Microsoft technologies and this has to be rectified as quickly as possible. Why? Well, firstly, it’s the cuckoo in the nest - my company is part of a larger group, and all the rest use Open Source technologies. Second, the costs of licensing as well as maintenance have gone up. As a result we are changing over, slowly; my company’s site is now a mixture of PHP and ASP pages. Some of the PHP sections call upon XML feeds generated through a query to MS SQL.

MS SQL is supposed to be an industrial strength database. Microsoft claims it “was engineered for enterprise data management for organizations of any size”; they also claim that their XML support “help organizations seamlessly connect internal and external systems”. Experience has now proven that this is absolute nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the feed when it works, but empirical evidence from the live environment has shown that the additional queries are killing the database server. The server is a well specified box, and should be able to handle the queries just as easily as it did when it was hosting the entire site. It can’t.

Fortunately, there is a way around it - I’ve told my developer to run a query every 24 hours which will take the necessary data from MS SQL and store it in a hash table in MySQL. The PHP code will query MySQL rather than utilise an XML feed. This change will reduce the dependency, though we will have to remember to run the chron job every time there is an urgent update and ensure that the query runs correctly. Overall, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud of a problem; the timetable for shifting completely to PHP / MySQL has been moved up a gear.

However, I am not soon going to forget how badly MS SQL plays with others, the issues this has created, the customer complaints and the sheer amount of pain that we are going through. I try to console myself with the thought that these are “growing pains”; we will mature from having gone down the Microsoft way to a point where we are doing things using proper Open Source tools. From my perspective, that day can’t come soon enough.

My parents are coming to West Sussex for a visit in October; I got yet another reminder of their impending visit in the past few days. Technology is on the list of things I have to prepare for them; they are both avid users of the internet, and can’t live without e-mail, even though they require my guidance to set up Thunderbird correctly.

As they’re both Mac people, I decided to try a little experiment and see how “Mac-esque” I could get Ubuntu Linux to be. Call it laziness, but I really don’t feel like explaining a whole new operating system to either of them; I love them dearly, but playing technical support does wear on one after a while.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of information about how easy it is to make one’s Ubuntu desktop into a virtual Mac clone. By far the best guide is at www.taimila.com; after following the relatively easy steps the blog describes, I sat back, astonished. For all intents and purposes, I was looking at a Mac interface…put onto the cheap desktop PC that I had assembled last week. Yes, its beige, ugly case was nothing to look at - but many of the main attractions of owning a Mac, its excellent user interface and reliability were in my grasp for a fraction of the cost.

To be absolutely fair to Apple, there are some niches in which it excels, particularly in publishing, design and video editing. However Apple is not satisfied with this rather small market, and is now trying to expand its offering to encompass those who are merely looking for an alternative to Windows. For those people, Apple is more Bling Bling than the Real Thing.

It’s difficult to be too angry at Apple; after all, the machines they build are very good looking and they also have had the good sense to base their OS on BSD. However the bling of Apple’s styling and OS come at a premium. A Mac mini with an Intel Core Solo, 512 MB of RAM, a 60 GB hard drive and Intel Integrated Graphics (which is absolutely the worst in terms of graphics rendering) costs £399. Word processing, Office and graphics software are extra. The desktop that I built with an AMD Sempron processor, a 120 GB hard drive, 1 GB of RAM and PCI-E graphics costs nearly £100 less, and includes Ubuntu’s full range of Office and Graphics software.

The extra price also does not ensure extra performance. It has been proven that Linux is faster than OS X using the G5 processor; it is also clear that it is generally more efficient on the new Intel based Macs as well. In fairness, the latter may have something to do with porting some Power PC processor based applications to the new Intel architecture.

Strip away the advantages of the user interface and performance, all that Apple has is a machine that looks very nice on one’s desk; in other words, all that’s left is the bling. One can say one spent an outrageous amount of money on one’s Apple and invite others to “ooh” and “aahh” at the slick casing of, for example, a MacBook Pro. It’s the equivalent of rap artists who used to drink Cristal champagne rather than beer just to show how upmarket they were; they obviously didn’t care about the quality of the alcohol, it’s just the status symbol and the money spent that counts.

Those of us who care about genuine value and quality have better things to do than buy pretty toys; Linux still continues to offer better value and performance than anything produced by Microsoft or Apple and still looks good while doing it. Those that produce hardware and software bling should be worried; one day the public is going to catch on; there are signs this is already occuring. Once that happens, easy to use, reliable and yes, stylish computing will no longer be the province of merely those who can afford it.

Let’s be honest. Ubuntu is a beautiful operating system, but whoever decided that brown was going to be its signature colour wasn’t playing with a full deck. Brown hasn’t been in vogue since the 1970’s, when apparently everyone’s senses were taken over by space aliens from the Planet Tacky.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to change it; first and foremost is getting rid of that awful background image, which could be entitled “Vat of Swirling Chocolate in Slough”. Download your image, put it somewhere safe (I generally keep a folder called wallpaper in my Home directory), right click anywhere on the desktop, browse to your image of choice, and voilà, that’s gone.

But Ubuntu Brown is more insidious than that; it makes an appearance in both the login screen (i.e., the screen that prompts you for your password) and the splash screen (the little widget that tells you that Nautilus and Update Manager are loading up).

I’m happy to report that changing the login screen is a snap. However, changing the splash screen was a bit more complex.

First and foremost, pick your login screen and splash screen. I used www.gnome-look.org to find ones that I liked. The login screens can be found under “GDM Themes”. The splash screens have their own link.

Login screens should be downloaded and saved as a tar.gz file. Look then under System > Administration > Login Screen Setup. You’ll see a button to allow you to add a theme. Browse to the relevant package and install it. You can also change the colour of the desktop using the eyedropper tool on this screen.

What to do with the splash screen is less straightforward. The image for the splash screen is held in /usr/share/pixmaps/splash, and there are two copies of the same image - ubuntu-splash.png and ubuntu-slick.png.

Before doing anything, I made two copies of the downloaded splash screen and put them on the Desktop. I renamed the copies ubuntu-splash.png and ubuntu-slick.png. I then went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed:

cd /usr/share/pixmaps/splash

And then -

sudo mv ubuntu-splash.png ubuntu-splash-old.png

Which renamed the old splash screen rather than deleted it, in case I ever wanted it. I did the same to ubuntu-slick -

sudo mv ubuntu-slick.png ubuntu-slick-old.png

Then migrate back to the Desktop using cd - the directory is /home/yourname/Desktop. I then typed -

sudo mv *.png /usr/share/pixmaps/splash

I rebooted my machine to test if it had worked; it had. You may want to do the same, if only to enjoy the fact that the brown has disappeared.

I got approval from Group IT for my little project to build my own Linux desktop PC for my office. The parts arrived today. The good news is that I have it up and running after a few hours work; the better news is that a secondary experiment, trying to select components that are instantly detected by Ubuntu succeeded, including the wireless network card.

The parts I chose are as follows -

1 Gigabyte GA-K8NE (rev. 2.0) motherboard (Socket 754)

2. AMD Sempron 3100+ processor

3. Corsair 1 GB 400 Mhz memory module

4. Seagate Barracuda 120 GB hard drive (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache)

5. Creative Soundblaster Audigy Card

6. Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 6600 PCI-E graphics card with 256 MB RAM.

7. SMC Ez-Connect Turbo Wireless PCI Card (SMCWPCIT-G)

8. NEC DVD-RW Drive

I didn’t bother getting a floppy drive as I haven’t used floppy disks since the Clinton Administration.

I put all the parts together in an X-Power C100 desktop case - it’s plain, it’s ugly, it’s beige. The idea was that a plain, drab exterior was going to hide a powerful PC. This particular case was a mistake, though - the X-Power case is painfully cheap - and I managed to cut myself on one of the sharp edges whilst putting the system together.

Apart from losing some blood, assembly was fairly straightforward - the motherboard is not the nicest fit in this case, but adequate. I did have to have an extra IDE cable on hand to connect both the DVD RW and hard drives.

Once up and running, I went into the BIOS, and modified the configuration to turn the motherboard’s sound off - otherwise this would confuse Ubuntu during setup. I then put in the Desktop CD and found, to my joy, all the hardware worked. Installation was similarly painless. Yes, there were a lot of updates to download, but the combination of the fast wireless, hard drive, processor and memory meant it did not take long.

I used EasyUbuntu to configure most of the multimedia items and the Nvidia driver, with the exception of Flash and Java; these I downloaded and installed myself. In order to set the driver up fully, there is one last step to follow - go into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and then type:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Reboot, and the system should now use the correct driver. Using the nvidia driver as opposed to nv is very important - I found for some odd reason that the video card ran very hot using nv - it cooled right down using nvidia. Perhaps the nvidia driver makes a much more efficient use of resources; in any case, it is a critical addition to prevent a meltdown.

I also had to fiddle with the sound card settings in order to make it run with Flash and other applications. I opened up a Terminal window and typed -

cat /proc/asound/modules

There I found the name of my sound card.

I then typed -

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Which opened up gedit. At the end, I tacked on the following line for my Audigy card -

options snd-ca0106 index=0

If you’re trying this at home, substitute whatever sound card name you have for the “snd-ca0106″ - change underscores to dashes.

With the correct settings in hand, the PC was fully ready to go. The broadband connection here at the office is not particularly great, but the wireless card (configured on ath0) picked it up automatically and made the best of it - I will run tests with it at home at some point to see how well it performs there. That said, the people at SMC and Ubuntu have done very well - this is by far the most painless wireless card installation I’ve ever had on a Linux distribution.

Overall, the PC runs quietly, efficiently, and very fast. I will add more memory next month as well to see if there are any performance gains; but even without an extra 1 GB of RAM, it’s so fast it could be called Beige Lightning and it’s a perfect counterpoint to my dull, drab Windows PC.

I’m originally a Londoner, but I always wanted to move to the countryside, particularly after seeing how the other half live in December 1997. I was visiting a software firm; their offices were located in the middle of Dorset. I had to drive for hours on winding roads to a tiny village located in the middle of a small valley. The offices were above a pub and they had a T1 line. The fellow who ran the company, an ardent Linux advocate, excused himself at the end of the meeting by saying:

“I’m sorry, I have to go and play the piano at the village church for their Christmas play.”

I thought that was so cool.

After the meeting, I went for a walk along a country lane, sucking in the cool, clean air and when I looked up, I saw a strange sight - the most stars I’d seen anywhere outside a planetarium. At that moment, I knew that I had to get out of the city, and eventually I got my wish. Fast forward to 2006, and I’m presently looking for a little corner of West Sussex in which to permanently settle down.

My lovely, intelligent and wise girlfriend brought up a major point as we began our search: “Make sure you check out the internet services that are available.”

She knows me well. I am the type of person who insists on having an 8 MB business broadband line in my private home. She also realised, rightly, that what’s available to people in the countryside is not always as good as what the city slickers in London get. Presumably it’s the compensation for being jostled in the Tube on a daily basis, rising gun crime and property prices that would break the Bank of England - your life may be a load of camel excrement, but, hey, at least you have the latest and greatest broadband.

Fortunately service in the shires has improved; unlike that fellow in 1997, I don’t have to get a dedicated line to achieve a high speed connection. This year, I was able to make the leap from 2 to 8 MB, and believe me, there is a difference, particularly if you download Linux distros constantly like I do. So how does one maintain this high standard of living while looking for a new house? I’ve gathered a few hints.

1. Forget cable. Not that many people, particularly in the countryside, were going to be able to consider it; NTL claims that it’s only second to BT in terms of the size of its network, but what they don’t say is that it’s so far in second it’s not anywhere in sight. Furthermore, I have used their services before and found they were far less flexible than ADSL; equipment such as ADSL routers are far more generic than those one gets with cable broadband.

2. Get the postcode. The postcode of any property you consider is the first key to discovering what services are available.

3. Go to Yell. It’s fairly simple to plug the first part of a postcode of the property you’re considering and find the phone number of a local store, cafe or in some cases, farming equipment supplier. Generally speaking, the business will be on the same exchange as the property. The local exchange determines what broadband services are available.

4. Use the broadband checker on BT Broadband. It doesn’t matter if you want to use BT or not, they will be able to tell you how fast you can go, under most circumstances.

5. After you’ve found your speed, find your service using www.adslguide.org.uk. This is, by far, the best source of consumer advice on which one to pick.

6. If you’re renting, ask the potential service provider if they are part of BT’s programme which allows your services to be moved along with your telephone account. I found out I couldn’t do this with Bulldog the last time I moved and I was disappointed.

7. Try not to chew the carpet while you wait for broadband to be switched on. Bulldog was the worst in so far as that was concerned - I had to wait over a month. BT Business Broadband had me on in less than 5 days.

8. If you have wireless, remember you still need security. Even if your immediate neighbours are a bunch of cows in a pasture (as opposed to ones in semi-detached houses screaming at their 15 kids), switch on some form of filtering; wireless signals travel further than you think, and broadband leeches are always a danger.

Following these hints, I’ve managed to maintain my fast connection to the rest of the world, while staying away from it. As I pick a house which is still further buried in the shires, I am glad that it’s likely that I will be able to continue to do so.

I have just spent the better part of a Sunday trying to get Xubuntu to work on an aged Dell Latitude LS. I regret to say that it is not operating in a stable state.

The Latitude LS came with the following configuration -

Pentium III processor
128 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive

For this reason, I downloaded the Xubuntu alternate CD, which allows a non-GUI install; I highly recommend staying away from the graphical installer with anything less than 256 MB of RAM on your machine and also with a processor with less power than a Pentium III.

Installation was a nightmare; the Latitude LS has a detachable CD drive and the performance of this drive was suspect at best. The first install failed; the drive actually scratched the CD. It worked the second time with a fresh disc.

That said, there are limitations - sound does not work. The screen resolution, 800 x 600, is so tiny as to be almost unusable. It is not a fast booting machine by any means - it would often get “stuck” as it booted, and I would have to power down and start all over again.

The biggest issue was trying to install wireless cards. I had most success with the Linksys WPC54g (Version 1.2) card, using the Broadcom chipset. I was actually able to get it up and running on the internet for a brief time. To do so, I followed these instructions -

1. Open Synaptic, and in SETTINGS-> REPOSITORIES enable Universe repositories.

2. Search for fwcutter. Mark bcm43xx-fwcutter for installation, and install it.

3. Download the latest drivers for the Linksys WPC54g from www.linksys.com. Note: ensure you download the V2.0 drivers - yes, this is supposed to work with a V1.2 card.

4. Extract the files. I chose to extract them to a folder I created called “wireless”

5. Open a terminal. Type:

cd wireless
sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter bcmwl5.sys

There were several “errors”, but none were fatal.

6. Finally, type -

sudo cp *.fw /lib/firmware

7. Go to the network settings item in the Administrator tools and enter all the data for your wireless card. It should function.

However upon reboot, the system hanged at loading hardware drivers. This is not atypical - as previously stated, the laptop would hang at different times during the boot process, and this behaviour began prior to the card’s installation.

Sad to say, my conclusion is that it is too flaky and unreliable to be useful. As I understand it, getting the sound to work on this laptop is also extremely difficult. It may very well be the most Linux-unfriendly PC available.

Please note: there may be reason to hold out some hope - this particular laptop had been suffering from problems with its battery and power supply, so a unit with these in a more intact state may yield better results, however I remain skeptical about its ability to be useful with Linux.

This post is intended for those who want more than the core Microsoft fonts for their Ubuntu Dapper Drake computer. If you want those core fonts, I recommend the EasyUbuntu tool available at:

http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/

Believe it or not, installing TrueType fonts is really easy. Very simply:

1. Download your font. If it’s zipped, extract the .ttf file to the Desktop.

2. Go into the Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

3. Type the following line and hit enter:

cd Desktop

4. If this is the first true type font you’re installing, then type the following line and hit enter:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/myfonts

5. Otherwise (or then) type the following and hit enter -

sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/myfonts/

Remember, the “.ttf” is case sensitive.

6. To install the font, then type -

sudo fc-cache -f

..and hit enter. It will take a few seconds, but once the prompt re-appears, the font will then be available to all your programmes.

The Dell Dimension which has been serving as my work computer will be retired early next week; at long last, my company laptop is due. The fellows from Group IT who visited me today did seem somewhat impressed that such an old PC could be brought back to life with the help of Xubuntu; I’m not sure if it won any converts, but certainly, I think Linux on the desktop is going to get a second look.

As the end is near, it is perhaps worth reviewing the question, how well does Xubuntu perform on a low end machine such as this? As a reminder, it’s a Pentium III, 440 MB of RAM with a 10 GB hard drive. I put in a Netgear MA311 wireless card and an Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics card.

The answer is “it’s OK”. The machine has given me no major problems - it’s not its fault that the hard drive grinds loudly as it spins and the power supply is noisy. It certainly runs Firefox and Opera competently as well as Thunderbird; I really question the choice of bundling Xubuntu with the Abiword word processor (I question less the selection of Gnumeric as the spreadsheet) - Abiword has many more anomalies in interpreting Word Documents than Open Office. I understand that “lightness” was the primary concern in selecting Abiword over Open Office, however the user should have the ability to choose which Office software they prefer during the installation process.

I have had a minor issue in browsing some websites; there are some which engage Flash, which normally runs fine - however in rare instances it has caused the browser to crash. Apart from this, I can find no fault with the machine, which boots up quickly, and has been serving me well since I put it together. It certainly would make a good little machine for anyone who wanted an introduction to Linux, as such, I’m likely to keep it for my hitherto Windows saturated staff to show them they have nothing to fear. I suspect that as a long term machine, yes, it would never be a speed demon, but certainly, it does enough well for it to be considered a going concern.

Thanks again to the Xubuntu development team for helping me get through my first month in a new job and ensuring that I was productive in that space of time.

Over a year ago, I bought a laptop that I thought would be powerful enough to handle Windows for a while. I know there are some Linux folk who are probably screaming, “Heretic, heretic, kill the unbeliever!”

However, hear me out - I only wanted Windows so I could play “Rome: Total War”. It’s an intensive, great game, and it doesn’t look like Cedega or Wine are up to utilising it yet on Linux.

I digress. After one year of Windows, the laptop had pretty much ground to a halt. It was no slouch either -

Pentium IV, 3.6 Ghz

2 GB of RAM

60 GB hard drive, 7200 RPM

ATI Radeon X800 128MB Video Ram

Yet with all that power, patch after Windows patch led it to the same destination that all Windows machines arrive at - nowhere.

The good news is that once Linux is installed, it works extremely well. The bad news is that it requires fiddling with the video and wireless settings to get there.

Before you start, ensure your laptop is plugged in via a cable to your broadband router; you are going to need it. Fortunately the ethernet card works out of the box.

Display

I chose to tackle the display issues first. Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type the following:

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

sudo depmod -a

sudo aticonfig –initial

sudo aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv

Reboot. You may find that the setting of the screen is still too “in your face”, i.e., set at 1024 x 768. Go into Terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down and you will see entries like this -

Monitor “Generic Monitor”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 1
Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″

Insert “1680×1050″ before every instance you see of “1024×768″.

Reboot. Your screen should now be lovely.

Wireless

Unfortunately with this model they included an Inprocomm wireless card, which has a chipset that has no native Linux driver. This may have changed over time, however. The K90 comes with a purple CD ROM marked “Communication Products - WLAN Driver & Utlility, Bluetooth Driver & Utility”. On this CD go into the following folders - Software, then WLAN Software, then IPN2220 Driver, then winnt. Click, hold, drag and drop these files onto the Desktop -

neti2220.inf

i2220ntx.sys

Open the Terminal and type the following:

cd Desktop

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils

This will install ndiswrapper, which will adapt your Windows drivers to work with Linux. Once it’s done installing type the following

sudo ndisrwapper -i neti2220.inf

sudo depmod -a

sudo ndiswrapper -m

Just to make sure all is well, type:

sudo ndiswrapper -l

You should get the following response:

Installed ndis drivers:
neti2220 driver present, hardware present
Reboot. The wireless card can then be configured by going into System > Administration > Networking. It should pick the wireless card as wlan0.

You may notice that the reading on the wireless card is always 100% or if you’re out of range, 0%. That’s because the windows drivers do not contain a facility to guage signal strength. Otherwise, however, performance is excellent…and Linux on a SavRow is more than fast…it’s luxurious.