Its been a thorn in my side for months now, but yesterday I thought I’d have another stab at getting my wifi working on my laptop (glutton for punishment, I know) yesterday. Imagine my surprise when, on booting, the wifi connected no problem.

Despite not working on its initial install, it now seems quite happy. I’m still not completely sure how well the default driver (b43-fwcutter) is supporting my card as, while the connection seems stable, the blue wifi light on my laptop keeps flicking on and off. Could just be an asthetic thing though, but I may try switching over the driver to ndiswrapper and seeing what happens.

Still, if this test install runs smoothly for the next week or so, I reckon I’ll completely repartition the laptop and setup Ubuntu Intrepid as its main OS. Which given how creaky the 3-and-a-half year old WinXP installation was getting will make me a lot happier. Looks like a win for the new network manager.

I got around to quickly installing Intrepid on my laptop last night, but with the usual mixed results sadly.

Most hardware was detected and works out of the box no problem (graphics, sound etc), but networking is still an issue. The restricted drivers manager did ID my wireless card no problem and installed the driver for it, so that side of things is working, but the actual connection to my wifi network is still problematic. Network manager does seem happy that its connected, but I’m assuming the WPA encryption is still failing, as I can’t actually do anything with the connection.

Ethernet’s proving an issue with this new release as well. Whenever I reboot and want to use an ethernet cable, I’ve got to re-enter all the details. The new network manager (which I’m not actually that impressed by, I don’t think the interface is as obvious to use as the old manager) doesn’t seem to be saving the settings properly. Although I presume that’s something I can fix by setting up the config files manually, since it works fine in my upgraded main PC.

I’ve not really mucked about with it much yet, this is just first-install impressions.  To be honest though, aside from the issues with the network manager, the wifi stuff is exactly the same kind of problem I’ve been having with other releases, so I don’t think that’s anything to do with Intrepid.  Its something more fundemental that’s going wrong I feel.

Well, as the countdown I posted on the blog should be indicating, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex was released today.

I’m always quick to nab new updates and try out the new stuff, so I upgraded my PC straight away, and the good news is that so far it seems to have been a painless process. The new Gnome theme feels a little more polished, but other than the general stability I’ve not played with it much. Of course, given that previous upgrades have tended to break something (the 7.xx series tended to break my sound, fortunately something that the 8.xx series has fixed), the main thing for me is the upgrade has been smooth. The only bit of weirdness so far is that the window title bars sometimes go a bit weird on me, but there’s nothing major going wrong.

I’m a glutton for punishment I think. I’ve blogged about this before, but I’ve been having another crack at getting the wifi to work on my laptop under Ubuntu again.   I really can’t figure it out.

With ndiswrapper, I get my broadcom card’s drivers installed.  Near as I can tell, this definitely works.  The blue light comes on, and I can get my laptop connecting to my wifi either unencrypted, or using WEP.

However, I use WPA on my LAN, and I’m not particularly wanting to compromise it’s security.  And it seems to be at the WPA authentication that everything’s falling apart.  I’ve tried both ndiswrapper and the fwcutter drivers automatically installed by Ubuntu.  I’ve even borrowed a kernel-supported wireless PCMCIA card from a friend, and that had the same problem.

I’ve tried different distros, broadcasting my usually-hidden SSID (and that was a story within itself), and nothing seems to work.

At this point I’d be suspecting my router of being Linux unfriendly, except that my Xandros-powered EeePC talks to it no bother (after installing some of the updates).

Its been really doing my head in.  I’ve tried both the gnome network manager, and last night I tried wicd (which, having now played with it, I actually think is a bit nicer than the Gnome version).  At this point I’m wondering if manually configuring my wlan settings by hand is the way to go…

I reckon tonight I’ll need to sit down, note my network card details etc, and put a post up on Ubuntu Forums pleading for help.

So, I decided to take the plunge, and partition off a small (couple of Gb) Linux system on my laptop, to see if it would be usable enough to replace Windows on it.

So, I put on Ubuntu 8.04, and in fairness to it (you can tell this is going to end well ;-)), most stuff worked perfectly. Graphics and sound worked no problem, although by default the switch to enable headphone jack sensing was switched to off. However once I found the option in the mixer, it worked perfectly. Graphics (intel-based) ran fine at 1024×768, with even Compiz working fine (although I switched it off as its not really needed on my laptop).

However, there was a big problem. Wifi.

Now, Ethernet worked fine. I plugged in a cable, set the IP address etc, and the laptop was online no problem. However my wifi light remained dark. A quick bit of reading up, and I found out my wireless card (Broadcom 4306) needed to use either ndiswrapper or the new B43-fwcutter to use the Windows driver/access the firmware code. Fair enough. I tried both, and in both cases the blue light came on. However also in both cases, I couldn’t connect to my WPA-secured network.

After spending an afternoon messing about with it. I admitted defeat.

In the evening though, I thought, as a last-ditch attempt, I’ll try Mandriva just to see if another distro can sort it out.  I installed the system, and was very happy to see that one of the last steps in the installation was to select the driver (I picked B43-fwcutter) and enter all your wireless settings.  Something I must admit I prefer to Ubuntu’s (sort it out after you’ve rebooted approach, although there’s no real benefit to either).

Much to my surprise, the wifi sprung to life.  The blue light came on, and it connected.   I was pretty happy.

However, I do prefer Ubuntu’s package management.  So I thought that perhaps KDE made the difference.  So I tried installing Kubuntu.  Long story short, I must admit, I found Kubuntu much less polished than the main distro, but I also was back to having a non-working wifi.

Currently I’ve reinstalled Mandriva.  However, big surprise, the wifi’s playing up again.   I’m pretty much at the point of sticking to Windows, and just trying to ensure that my next laptop (which is probably a while away) has a natively-supported wifi chipset.

I am wondering however if part of the problem is me trying out different drivers (ndiswrapper and b43-fwcutter) and if they’re causing problems for each other.   Of course, installing one uninstalls the other, and I update the blacklist as appropriate, but given that I did get it working under Mandriva at one point, I am stuck wondering what exactly is going on.

That was typical.   No sooner had I finished that last post, and my Ubuntu updates dialog popped up again.   I let it grab the latest Gnome updates, and then it went about configuring everything.  Including the kernel updates that hadn’t been properly configured last time.

Turns out the issue was that when they’d first installed, I tried to select some of the other options regarding the menu.lst file (display diffs etc).  That seemed to confuse issues.  This time, knowing my current menu.lst file was backed up, I simply let it write the default package one to the boot folder.   Once it was finished setting everything up, I went in and put back in the entries I needed (mainly Windows at the top of the list).  One reboot later, and everything’s working fine on the new kernel.

The new options to try and deal more sensibly with the menu.lst clashes are certainly welcome, but I guess there’s still a few bugs to be worked out there.

So, as I’d mentioned previously, following my system rebuild, my LAMP server wasn’t quite playing ball.

I finally had time to look into it the other week, and it came down to the MySQL administration.

Previously, I’d been using the MySQL-admin GUI to setup my local databases and users, but for some reason, when setting them up under my current installation, the GUI wasn’t assigning the login credentials properly.  This meant that whenever I tried to install phpBB or Joomla or something locally, the database connection kept complaining.

So, I installed the trusted phpMyAdmin and tried setting the users up with that.   It was slightly less user-friendly I thought, but ultimately, it also worked.  Login credentials were correctly assigned, and the php applications were much happier connecting to the database.

Weird one though.  The MySQL-admin package shouldn’t be any different from the one I was using previously, which worked fine.   But nonetheless I’ve got the system working now, which is the main thing for me.

Now I just need to figure out what went wrong with the latest kernel update from Ubuntu.   I installed all the latest updates the other day, and when I try and boot off the new kernel image, the NVidia driver throws a wobbly.  Fortunately I can boot off the previous image and get a perfectly usable system until I get it fixed though.

Ok, its half 1 in the morning, and I’m knackered.

I’ve now got my Windows system pretty much usable again. I had to spend all afternoon going through my iTunes library, removing dud duplicates it created when reimporting my (sadly several months old and missing stuff) backup though. And I’m still bitter about it nuking music on my iPod that it should’ve just transferred back to the PC like it was supposed to.

I’ve been in general quite happy with how smooth Ubuntu was to get back to a usable state. Granted, extra Window Managers and the like still need to be reinstalled, but that’s going to be trivial with Synaptic.

The only problem I’m having is with the LAMP server. I used the same tutorial as before, however now, whenever I create a new MySQL user, despite setting a password, they only connect to the database when the password field is blank. Plus the PHP installation doesn’t seem to like talking to MySQL at all. Its a bit of a contrast to the first time I set it up, where it went really smoothly.

However, that stuff is low priority thankfully. This isn’t a work PC, so that can always be fixed during the week.

Doctor Who was good though. Must post on that tomorrow.

Ok, so reinstalling my whole PC hasn’t been an awful lot of fun. And thanks to iTunes for kicking me while I’m down, by deleting the music that was on my iPod that it could’ve just synced back into the library. That’s my freshly-bought Iron Man soundtrack up the spout. Think I’ll just buy the CD next time Steve.

However, doing a clean install of Windows and Ubuntu has been an interesting experience. It has to be said, that out of the two Ubuntu wins hands down. It was faster for a start. But more importantly it was also a heck of a lot smarter at detecting my hardware. On booting into my freshly installed Windows system I had no network card and no sound. Fortunately I had the Asus driver CD, so I was able to get them up and running, but the missing network connection was a heart-stop moment.

Contrast this with Ubuntu, which auto-detected all my hardware smoothly. Getting it online was a breeze. And as a plus, Hardy also now correctly uses my router as a DNS server. Previous Linux installations have always needed the direct IP addresses for the DNS servers supplied by my ISP. The only real glitch was in the NVidia driver, which wasn’t properly setup. But that was quickly fixed by installing the newer package from synaptic, and then running the command prompted by the Nvidia config utility.

However, the really fun thing was a result of XP service pack 3. Of course, with a newly-minted Windows install I got my anti-virus and firewall reinstalled and then hit Windows Update. The first thing it got me to install was SP3. I’d heard dodgy things, so wasn’t too happy, but what can you do?

However, a real fun factor of SP3, is that it breaks the ability to install MS software, and use Windows update. Installing separate things like iTunes was a breeze, but Windows Live Messenger, or all those critical IE fixes just wouldn’t install.

A quick websearch through up this forum post.

Essentially you can fix it by copy-and-pasting the following into a command prompt:

regsvr32 wups2.dll

Its easily fixed. But still, that’s a hell of a bug to leave in there. Crippling Windows Update also makes me wonder how exactly they’re planning on rolling out the fix…

Well, I had a fairly major IT disaster last night.

I’d decided that I wanted to move away from booting multiple Linux distros. There’s a reasonable maintanance overhead, and with me only wanting to install them to see what they’re like, it really makes more sense to use virtualisation, especially since that’s something else I’ve been meaning to take a look at.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, I do like my eye candy. And there’s no doubt that SuSE and Mandriva’s grub menus are a lot nicer to look at than Ubuntu’s plain old ncurses one.

So I did some digging, and found out how to setup gfxmenu on Ubuntu, and proceeded to switch over.

Big mistake. I don’t know quite what it did, but the NTFS filestructure on my PC’s windows drive (the boot device for the PC) was irretrievably corrupted. I noticed Ubuntu was having problems reading it, and when I tried to reboot, it just wasn’t happening. After digging around, it became clear that the NTFS file structure on the drive had been completely hosed, and the only thing to do was a complete reformat.

So, I’m now rebuilding my Windows installation piece-by-piece, while trying not to think too hard about what files I’ve lost. Fortunately I bought a 500Gb external drive over Christmas, so I’ve not lost as much as I might’ve, but I’ve still probably lost most of my save games (especially any recent ones), and anything in my iTunes from that last few months (some purchases, and a few audiobooks I’ve ripped).

Once I’ve got the basics of the Windows system sorted out, I’ll plugin the external drive and see what I do and don’t have, but at the moment its just gutting.

So take heed people. NCurses is pretty enough. And backup regularly.

As a side-note, I also completely wiped and reinstalled Ubuntu, not wishing to risk having a dodgy grub installation repeat the mistake. That gave me a few oddities that didn’t happen when I was upgrading to Hardy rather than clean installing, so I’ll have to remember to post about that experience.