Bleh. This weekend was rather eventful, both in the technical and the social side of things. Not that it was bad, mind you… I just had a long weekend is all, and now I’m sitting at work and wishing I could have gotten a bit more time in bed. In any event, I’ll start with the technical. I’ll get up to speed on the social one in the next post.
My big project this weekend was to get wireless networking operational on Samus (my Presario running Linux; I name my machines after female video game characters). This turned out to be MUCH easier said than done. Now, don’t get me wrong… I love Linux. However, with Linux, hardware support is either feast or famine. In other words, the hardware is either immediately supported with no issues whatsoever, or it’s a complete and utter pain in the ass to get operational (if it’s even possible). I have a Linksys WPC54GS card that I use for wireless networking in Samus. However, there were no Linux drivers available for it. I ended up needing to download and install a program called ndiswrapper. ndiswrapper acts as, well, a wrapper to allow Windows wireless networking drivers to operate under Linux. In addition, my home wireless network and my AirPort Express’s default “travel” configuration use WPA for their encryption and authentication, and apparently the distro of Linux I’m using (Fedora Core 4) doesn’t natively support WPA. So, I had to download a second program called wpa_supplicant in order to get WPA encryption working. Bleh. The end shot of all this is that unless I want to do some serious screwing around with some of the scripts on here, I have to activate wireless networking manually. Of course, that’s not really an issue, considering I only need the wireless network support when I insert the Linksys card into the PCMCIA slot manually…
At least wireless networking isn’t as much as a pain in the ass as power management. Apparently Linux doesn’t like the version of ACPI that’s on this laptop, even when I try to force it to use it. Power management was a big reason why I gave up using Samus as my primary work PC two years ago and switched to Nova (my Powerbook). I was running Red Hat Linux 9 at the time, and was watching the MK movie on a flight to E3… and the battery died after 45 minutes. Needless to say I wasn’t a happy camper at the time. What I wanted was a top of the line laptop running a UNIX variant that had decent power management, and Linux wasn’t cutting it. So, I switched to Mac OS X, and have been extremely happy with it. At least everything WORKS with it.
My next project on Samus will be trying to get IceWM working on it. As much as I like GNOME and KDE as desktop environments, they tend to be a strain on this machine. (Samus only has 128 MB of RAM, and I’ve never felt the need to spend money on a memory upgrade for it.) At least IceWM runs lighter than either of those two environments. The main challenge will be to make it where IceWM is a choice on the list of desktops one can load when you log into the machine. That so far is what’s frustrating me the most; most of the information I’ve been finding as to how to do that relates to Fedora Core 1 or 2, and it’s changed as of 3 or 4. *grumble*
Oh, well… I might keep Samus around after Nova gets back from the shop just so I have a second laptop I can use for different tasks, like checking network ports or doing security audits. We’ll see. The sooner I get Nova back the happier I’ll be… especially seeing as I have a fresh copy of iLife 05 ready to load on it. (iLife 05 = iMovie HD, iDVD 05, GarageBand 05, and iPhoto 05.) There’s some stuff I need to work on as well regarding the movie project Dave and I have been doing, so that’ll be needed. Oh, well…
In any event, that’s enough tech rambling from me. I’ll post later with my social experiences this weekend.