Comments, opinions and an occasional ramble
Foray into the world of Linux
Since I had an old laptop lying around, I decided to give it a new lease of life by installing Linux on it. The original XP has become unbearably slow, and I’m trying to test if I can live without Microsoft so I thought it would be a nice idea to try out Linux, the much touted free alternative OS to Microsoft.
I did some homework and settled for Simply Mepis 6.5, one of the various available Linux distros (think of distros as different brands of the same kind of product). Downloaded the iso image file and burned it onto a CD before popping it into my laptop that was previously cleaned up with Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN). DBAN is a great piece of software that’s free for personal use. It overwrites your harddisk with a string of zeros (all electronic information is stored in binary format, i.e. in combinations of zeros and ones), thus effectively destroying all information on the harddisk, especially if you let it run a few passes. Even data recovery professionals would be unable to recover the data. A nifty and must have tool if you want to donate/sell away an old computer. You don’t want the next owner to do data recovery and steal your passwords.
I used DBAN not because I need to destroy data, but I just wanted to get rid of all the data inside. Conventional formatting doesn’t clear out the old contents completely. With a nicely refreshed harddisk, I popped in the disc and it ran automatically. I clicked on install and after filling out some information, the installation detected and set up everything smoothly. Installation was a complete breeze.
The Mepis KDE desktop looked neat. It wasn’t hard for a native Windows user like me to use it. All the apps were working fine, except for the darn wireless. Spent a couple of hours looking for a solution online, but to no avail. For some strange reason, the wireless card DID manage to work a couple of times (out of the 40-50 times I tried to connect), so I don’t think the hardware is faulty. I decided to install another Linux distro, Ubuntu, to see if I have the same problem. So I downloaded Ubuntu 6.0.6 (also called Dapper Drake) and installed it. I couldn’t connect at all with Ubuntu.
I don’t suppose 2 popular distros are so lousy, so I guess it’s either the wireless card or the router (I’m more inclined to think it’s the former). I read alot of discussions on Linux forums about Cisco 350 series wireless cards being a pain in the neck, and different things work for different people, thus making things worse for a Linux newbie like me. Anyhow, I’m at my wits end now. I like the two distros that I tried, but I can’t use Linux if I can’t solve the wireless issue. The simplest way to prove that it’s the wireless card at fault would be to try another PCMCIA card, but I don’t think I want to shell out the money for another card that I am not sure will work.
All said, it’s a pretty good experience playing with Linux, save for this irritating problem. If there are any Linux experts out there who might have an idea about how to handle this issue, please contact me. I would love to tell money sucking Microsoft to kiss my laptop’s ass goodbye, provided I can get the wireless to work. 
| Print article | This entry was posted by Aaron Ng on 01/05/2007 at 3:26 am, and is filed under Technology. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 5 years ago
Maybe you should try the latest version rather than the LTS one?
about 5 years ago
Just to clarify: I’m not an expert. I’m just speaking from personal experience that I find Ubuntu very user-friendly.
about 5 years ago
But yah it does have some problems; I use Kubuntu 7.04(the latest one) and it can only detect my webcam intermittently.
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
I had the same problem as you with my wireless lan card which was not recognised. I had to actually edit the source code of the wireless driver and recompile the Linux Kernel to get it working. My wireless chip set was Atmel but my card was not among those supported so I had to add it into a list. It took me quite some time to get it up.
I suggest you buy a wireless card that is well known to be supported by the Linux distribution…believe me it is alot easier to go around the problem.
What is wrong with XP anyway? You can’t trust something you don’t have to pay alot for. The Linux is written by people for free with a passion for software …they contribute their precious time for the good of the general public. However, the best programmers have to be well compensated for their work and time which is a painful sacrifice otherwise they will design less than the best algorithms and corrupt the operating system causing it to collapse. Top programmers have many other career choices such as financial sector jobs that pay alot more. It make sense to pay them well although they work in a monopolistic company like Microsoft that is known to use less than fair tactics against its competitors. The OS may turn sluggish at times and blue screen occasionally but it is the best around so you have to stop whining about it. A home edition only cost $400 and you can use it forever so the cost per year if you use it over the next 50 years is only 5 plates char kway teow per year for a state of the art software technology.
I suggest you abandon your idea to use Linux and pay for XP. $400 isn’t alot to pay to entrust your 4 trillion bytes of data.
about 5 years ago
Lucky Tan,
I really have to disagree with your statement “What is wrong with XP anyway? You can’t trust something you don’t have to pay alot for.”
Have you ever used Linux? What do you mean, by “can’t trust”?
“I suggest you abandon your idea to use Linux and pay for XP. $400 isn’t alot to pay to entrust your 4 trillion bytes of data.”
Before spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about Linux, could you please describe why you think that Linux will cause data loss?
Just because Linux developers are not paid does not mean that they will code badly. There are many, many other devs who will see the written code and improve or replace it.
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
I think that you should try out the newest version of Ubuntu, 7.04, just released in April. It’s 10 months newer than Dapper Drake, and in my opinion, the best Linux distro for new users.
About your wireless card, you could try getting help from the Ubuntu Forums, or the #ubuntu IRC channel in the Freenode IRC server. Just specify the exact make and model of your card (such as “intel pro wireless 3945″) to make things easier for people to help. Heck, just post it in your blog so that I can help out too. =)
Edit: Try Ubuntu 7.04 before searching for help. Maybe 7.04 supports it out of the box.
Edit 2: See http://www.howtoforge.com/cisco_350_series_kismet . I don’t think that reconfiguring your kernel is necessary as you are using Ubuntu and not Gentoo, but this site should assure you that the card does work in Linux.
about 5 years ago
Lucky Tan,
Wah, I don’t know how to add things and recompile the kernel leh. I’m a native windows user and this is a little beyond me.
Haha… you very sly hor… must be listening to too much ba chor mee podcast.
about 5 years ago
Michael,
Thanks for the advice. I’ll go download Unbuntu 7.0.4 and see if it solves the problem. I was not expecting an issue with Cisco 350 series cards because it is an old card and it should technically be supported but I have no idea why it is not working. If only I can get it to work… I’m a fan of the Opensource movement by the way. I want to donate some $$$ to support the Linux community once I get it up and working.
about 5 years ago
Oh Michael, Lucky Tan was just being sarcastic and poking fun at the gah-men’s argument that $40 million is small amount to pay for $200 billion economy.
about 5 years ago
*boink*
Looks like Lucky Tan has mastered the skill of… whatever he does. wahaha
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
Please tell us how it goes (so I wouldn’t have to find out for myself). Looks like those folks fixed many wireless issues when I wasn’t looking in Ubuntu 7.04! Curse you open source movement!
Since you like the Mepis GUI you might want Kubuntu 7.04, because it uses KDE instead of GNOME, or even Linux Mint, just in case GNOME doesn’t do it for you.
about 5 years ago
I haven’t installed Ubuntu yet, but I do explore it using its Live CD. My wireless works there, so technically using wireless in Ubuntu shouldn’t be a problem… And nice to see *Arts student* exploring Linux, hehe!
about 5 years ago
“Since you like the Mepis GUI you might want Kubuntu 7.04″
The restricted drivers manager is not avaliable in Kubuntu, so I recommend installing Ubuntu (with Gnome) and installing kubuntu-desktop later.
about 5 years ago
YOu could try suse linux though its size is bigger than any of the gahmen’s ass.
about 5 years ago
Not many Gnome fans here, huh? I don’t really recommend KDE for first time users, especially when you’re setting up stuff… it’s like the Windows usability nightmare (I don’t know, I might be spoiled by my Mac) made 10000 times worse. But KDE does have plenty of useful features, which you will be thankful for. If your box works out fine that is.
You should be a bit more careful when trying to wipe data from hard disks. Journaling-capable filesystems like XP’s NTFS and your can retain fragments of incriminating data, especially if you’ve partitioned your hard disk.
You’re less in danger if your filesystem does journaling on metadata (“data about data”), but not all your data. You can set your box’s filesystem (which should inherit NTFS) to perform journaling on metadata, or what is called ordered mode.
(A journaling filesystem is, basically and inaccurately, a sort of an automatic backup for the system. Some filesystems do this for whole files, like OS X’s HFS , but I think XP’s is metadata only.)
I don’t know if you’re joking or not You jest, surely, Lucky, but in the mid 1990s BeOS had a fully functional equivalent to this “state of the art” desktop searching facility in Windows Vista today. You got results faster, too. It was sweet, easy, nice, and a BeOS machine took an average of 25 seconds to start up.
I only had the pleasure of using one around the early 2000s and it was easily the best computing experience I have ever had. That includes the fact that I use one of those shiny Macs these days.
about 5 years ago
The Palisade,
I found out the hard way that Lucky Tan was jesting about ministers’ pay hikes.
Speaking about BeOS, look at Haiku OS, a clone of BeOS currently in development.
Aaron,
How is it going with Ubuntu 7.04?
about 5 years ago
No luck.
Pondering the next step now.
about 5 years ago
Try the Ubuntu Forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/). Start a thread, and people will help you out, provided that you provide some background info, such as the make and model of your wireless card, laptop make and model, etc.
Go to a command-line in Linux and run the command “iwconfig”. Pasting the output in the forums will be useful for people to help you out.
The “lspci” and “lsmod” output will also be very helpful.
P.S. Please post the URL of the thread you started so that I can go over and help you there. =)
about 5 years ago
Maybe you should try Xubuntu? It’s made specifically for older, less-powerful hardware.
about 5 years ago
Actually my hardware isn’t that lousy, despite it being almost 4 years old. It’s a Pentium 4 mobile 2.4 ghz with 51112 MB ram, and I think it is more than capabable of running KDE.
about 5 years ago
Michael,
I ran all the diagnostics, and it is confirmed that the card is properly identified and detected but it just won’t connect for some weird reason. Not really sure what is the problem. I’ve tried a couple of the remedies on the forums with no luck. I don’t mind changing a wireless card but I don’t want to get one that doesn’t work.
about 5 years ago
Did you try using ndiswrapper? It requires some work, but it works ok with most wireless cards.
Second point to note is security. If you have WEP and stuff, it’s difficult to configure connectivity.
openSUSE works pretty well for me. You may wanna try that. Pretty straightforward connection and all.
about 5 years ago
Dear Aaron,
Before we can diagnose the problems with the wireless card, can you provide us the specs of your old laptop. Such technical details are necessary to further research into the problems. There are several issues with certain makes of wireless hardware, which may require a more geeky way to solve, lesser of a PnP method.
Thanks.
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
Maybe you should try disabling your encryption temporarily to confirm that it isn’t the culprit! I know WEP connections are supposed to work in Ubuntu, but sometimes, who knows… if it is, the next step is to figure out the problem.
When in doubt, power cycle your access point. That works ocassionally.
PS. WEP isn’t secure, BTW.
about 5 years ago
Try running wpa_supplicant manually, and then dhclient .In my case, I could get it running with:
sudo wpa_supplicant -i eth1 -D wext -C
sudo dhclient eth1
The option -D wext and -i eth1 could be different for your card. You’ll have to do some research on wpa_supplicant conf files and read the wpa_supplicant manual page:
man wpa_supplicant
Note that this is the command-line method. Try Network Manager (nm-applet) for a graphical version. It supports WPA.
about 5 years ago
I tried disabling WEP but still no luck. The Knetworkmanager always ends up getting stuck at 28% and then it refuses to connect.
My old laptop is a HP NX9000, which basically is a 2.4 Pentium 4 mobile chip with 512 MB RAM. It uses ATI graphics (shared with the RAM, adjustable via BIOS). The wireless card is a Cisco Aironet 350 series.
And yes, I did try using ndiswrapper. No luck as well. I’m a total sucker at the command line.
Tried a couple of commands recommended on Linux forums but didn’t work.
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
Hmm…
What is the output of the command “iwconfig”?
Just to sidetrack to my own experience: I also used to find it difficult to get hardware going when I first got hands-on with Linux about 3-4 years ago. My USB modem refused to work, even with the correct driver. Later, I realized that I had incorrectly configured it (dialled 1,100 instead of 0.100
).
My printer also did not work, until I got a new HP one.
My point is, please be patient with Linux. Hardware support is only 80% at most, and the steep learning curve disillusions many new users. But help is easily avaliable.
about 5 years ago
Aaron,
OK, so WEP isn’t the problem.
Can you check the MAC address of the machine, and then log in to your access point to check your logs? Normally you can access your AP via the machine controlling it directly, or remotely through a web browser or telnet. Did your logs register an access attempt? If so, post the error messages besides the iwconfig stuff.
about 5 years ago
Have you been able to use the Cisco card? I am having the same problem. I have also tried to utilize a Linksys (Cisco) USB card. It worked on my neighbors router (without WEP). I have not been able to get the 350 work. I do not get a DHCP address. I have a Linksys router. My neighbor appears to have a Belkin router.
Help….
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