Friday, June 24, 2005

Linux Resurrection

I've been without linux on my desktop workstation at home for some time now. Its no big deal since my research group saw fit to provide me with a powerbook. (OSX just wishes it was as cool as linux.) With my powerbook in hand I can work from home, which is nice for a procrastinator like me.

The problem with my desktop was that we (my wife and I) had recently moved all our computers to the second floor of our house. Since the cable came in downstairs I thought, "Heck, I'll just get a wireless router and some wireless pci cards and I won't have to run wires upstairs." It worked like a charm for my wife's Windows machine and my Windows laptop, but not so well for my dual boot workstation. I've gone through 3 different wireless cards looking for the magic combination of card and linux distro to get everything to work. I'd all but given up, using my desktop for the occasional Windows game, but little more.

Recently I had to replace my wireless router (I think lightning ate it, but it might just have been a POS). I replaced it wish a nice 802.11G router. Through some horse-trading I got an 802.11G PCI card for my workstation for nothing (free as in beer). I was positive that it wouldn't work with linux. It didn't, out of the box. No surprise.

I kept hearing about this open source project called ndiswrapper. It was supposed to magically use windows drivers in linux. I scoffed at the idea. "That trick never works!" Well last night I installed Ubuntu Linux. Its supposed to be "Linux for real people". Huh, I never considered Linux to be for anyone else, but what the hell. (Their homepage looks like a 'United Colors of Benetton ad from the 90s'.)

I installed Ubuntu. It has a real old fashioned feeling to the install. No gui, no pictures, no whistles, no bells, no problems. After grinding through the install I found it weird that it never asked for a root password. "Oh well, it'll ask upon first start." Nope. Ubuntu has this philosophy that you never need to log in as root (what real person would want to do that?). It adds all users to the sudoers, but no root log in. That confused the hell out of me for a bit, but after I figured out what was going on I 'sudid' a passwd change for root and tried to log into root via the window manager. That pissed it off. "Root not allowed to log in via this method".

Well excuse me.

After logging back in as a pedestrian user I installed ndiswrapper (sudo this...sudo that). I then proceeded on a quest to find the driver disk for my net card. After killing several orcs and an ogre magi I was rewarded with the 'Diske of Drivers +4" and was able to copy the .inf file and associated folders over to my computer.
Then it was simply a matter of
ndiswrapper -i driver.inf
ndiswrapper -l (Shows what drivers are loaded)
modprobe ndiswrapper (To load the module into the kernel)
Fire up the wireless networking utility nicely provided by ubuntu.
ndiswrapper -m (To load the drivers on boot).
IT WORKED!

I was thrilled, but cocky. If it works for this tinker toy linux, I'll bet it'll work for a real distro like Fedora Core 4.

I wiped ubuntu and installed FC4. Long story short, ubuntu is back on the workstation and its working just ducky. (FC4, you's got a lot of 'splaining to do!)

I've now found that ubuntu has some real nice features and I'm going to give it an honest trial run.

This makes my day. It amazing that it takes so little to make me so happy.

Carl

1 Comments:

Blogger The LQ said...

I've got an ubuntu distro. I testdrove it. the "no root login" thing was a little weird, but it works fine. Laptop installs require a little tweaking, but it's manageable.
I also have a copy of MEPIS and xandros. Right now I'm running xandros. It's kinda sorta Debian, but it has a couple elements that are supposed to make transitions from Windows or MacOS users a little more comfortable. I dunno...it's still the 2.4 kernel with KDE on top. I just wish my laptop's CD-ROM didn't choke on the disk.

Glad to see you in the blogosphere, Carl :)

2:45 AM  

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