Tag Archives: ubuntu

Ubuntu is impressive

Technology,

About a month ago I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu and needless to say I am impressed. Back in 1998 when I first found Linux and started playing around it was a RedHat boxen version (6.0) that I spent $40.00 on. I have pretty much been a RedHat man till they changed there business model and released there last free version, 9. Then I started looking to other distros and used SuSe for a while. It was not but a few months later that I was back to RedHat, this time with Fedora Core 2.

I was pleased with Fedora but after getting a new laptop this year and loaded Core 3 I had some difficulties with the display and wireless. Now I got those worked out but it was not without some googling and trial and error. The last straw was when attempting to customize the desktop I pretty much broke my login. Now that could have nothing to do with Fedora and everything to do with me, I’m not sure but after fixing it again started me wondering about what else was out there.

I thought maybe it was time to go a little more hard core and took a stab at Gentoo but quickly found that installing was a little more than I wanted to deal with. That led me to Ubuntu. Now the “hard core” comment can get thrown out the window here but this distro is impressive.

The installation is not GUI but that doesn’t matter, IMHO. What does matter is that hardward is recognized and setup correctly, Ubuntu did so without a problem. Video, sound, mouse, NIC’s, USB, CD/DVD .. all were recognized on installation. What was not found was an appropriate driver for the built in SD card reader and on board modem. These I don’t mind since I don’t use them. I’m sure with some googling I could find the correct ndiswrapper for the modem but not for the built in SD card.

To date it has been a little over a month with Ubuntu and I’m loving every minute of it. I still have Fedora Core 3 on a spare drive, the original 80GB. So this 10GB spare I’m using at the moment will become the backup soon and I put the original back and load Ubuntu. For now since I’m not doing anything with a CMS product I don’t really need the space. But that will change.

Wireless wakeup

Technology

Well I got a great laugh at myself this morning as I booted up and had no wireless connection. Sometimes the obvious is to close and you loose all perspective. You see I spent about an hour checking settings, viewing logs, starting and stopping networking, rebooting … just about anything I could think of. Of course nothing made sense so I started googling to see what I could be missing.

Keep in mind I did say “obvious” at the beginning.

Googling pointed me to a number of resources and they all commented about loading the current firmware and drivers. The wireless NIC is an Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915.

In an earlier post I noted getting a new laptop at the beginning of the year and since then have switched from Fedora to Ubuntu.

But then I got to thinking after loading Ubuntu wireless worked, in fact it worked out of the box and without a problem. So then I changed my tune as far as what I was searching for. Things had to of stopped working for a reason. So after a little more googling I “paid attention” to what was in dmesg.

$ dmesg | grep ipw2200
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 0.19
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:

Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On … right there in front of me and I didn’t even pay attention. Now mind you I’m not using the windows driver and the LED does not come on. So I checked what was set for the driver and sure enough “we are not searching for an wireless networks”.

$ cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/0000:02:06.0/rf_kill
2

With Ubuntu, or at least Horay and the package kernel, there is no software setting.. the driver does not support it. But if you push the wireless NIC button on the laptop rf_kill changes to 0. Wireless is up … end of story.

So don’t forget to check the obvious and save yourself some head scratching otherwise you might drift off into DEU (Delinquent End User) land.