Here’s a picture:
This is the same monitor that I’ve had for seven years, and it’s having some pretty drastic display problems, as evidenced by the picture. I thought it might be just a problem with the display settings, but couldn’t seem to fix it. I’m guessing that I dropped it one too many times, and the best fix would be to replace it. Maybe it’s a problem with the graphics card, but I doubt that.
I wrote a Ruby script to automate the process of connecting to a wireless access point. Granted, it would be better if the wireless adapter connected on startup, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. The script is a command line executable. It scans for all available networks, or lets you specify a network not listed in the scan. Then it gives the option of connecting with or without a WEP key, and finally it connects using DHCP.
This is one of my first Ruby scripts and as such is a bit rough. It could probably be condensed and would really need some comments, error checking, etc. But here it goes, in less than 50 lines:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
class Wifi
def initialize(devfile)
@devfile = devfile
@ssids = []
end
def scan
@ssids = []
for line in `wlanconfig #{@devfile} list scan`
ssid = line.chomp.split(/s+/)[0]
unless ssid == "SSID": @ssids.push(ssid) end
end
@ssids.push("other network")
end
def chooseNetwork
if @ssids.empty?: scan end
puts "Available networks:"
option = 1
for ssid in @ssids
puts option.to_s + ") " + ssid
option += 1
end
print "Select network #: "
@network = @ssids[gets.to_i-1]
if @network == "other network"
print "Specify other network name: "
@network = gets
end
end
def connect
print "Connect using WEP?: "
if gets =~ /^y/i
print "Input WEP key: "
wep = gets
`iwpriv #{@devfile} authmode 1`
`iwconfig #{@devfile} key #{wep}`
end
`dhclient #{@devfile}`
end
end
if __FILE__ == $0
wifi = Wifi.new("ath0")
wifi.chooseNetwork
wifi.connect
end
Drop a comment with any suggested improvements. It sure could use some.
I mounted and formatted my USB jump drive today. A fairly minor achievement, but a good application of what I’ve been reading in the Linux Administration Handbook about adding disks. When I plugged the jump drive into the USB port, it mounted automatically. The kernel assigned the drive the device file /dev/sdc1. So I went ahead and unmounted it, as follows:
sudo umount /dev/sdc1
Then I created a new file system on the disk, ran fsck, and remounted it:
sudo /sbin/mke2fs -j /dev/sdc1
sudo /sbin/fsck -f /dev/sdc1
sudo mkdir /mnt/jump
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/jump/
That’s that. Nothing too complicated. With the jump drive under my belt, I’m going to create a RAID 5 array with multiple LVM partitions. Just kidding.
My shoulder is kinda sore from so much patting myself on the back. This happens to be my first post on the new system via a wireless Internet connection. After physically connecting my DWL-G510 wireless adapter to a free PCI port, I downloaded and installed the MadWifi driver and followed their ‘First Time User’ HOWTO to get the adapter up and running and connected to my local access point.
I think the next challenge will be to shut down the PC, move it back over to the other side of the basement (I had temporarily relocated it closer to the router so that I could connect to the Internet with my short Ethernet cable), reboot the machine, and see if I can reconnect. And after that, I’ll do some research to figure out how to configure the adapter to automatically connect at startup.
Back to the task of installing a wireless network adapter. I have a D-Link DWL-G510 Wireless PCI Adapter that I want to install. As a brief anecdote, when I went to a computer store over a year ago to purchase the adapter, the salesman asked me which distro I was running, to which I responded that I didn’t know what distro meant. He rolled his eyes, handed me this adapter and asked me if I had any friends that could install it for me. Now I need to go about proving him wrong.
He did tip me off to a project called MadWifi, a device driver for wireless adapters with an Atheros chipset, and according to the MadWifi site, mine is compatible.
I just logged into my install of Fedora 7 for the first time. And now I’m running the package updater. The updater is downloading .rpm files and installing them, 12 in all. Considering this OS has been out less than a week, that seems like a lot of updates, but I think a lot of them are standard, such as Firefox 2.0.0.4.
I fixed my DVD-ROM problem that I mentioned in the last post, but it’s only a temporary fix. Both my DVD-ROM drive and my CD burner were connected to the computer using the same ATA cable, and the CD burner (device 1) was working while the DVD drive (device 0) was not. So I simply rewired the drives so that the DVD drive was device 1 and the CD burner was not connected at all, and then the DVD drive started working. And in fact, I was able to boot directly from the install DVD, as specified in my BIOS, without the use of the Smart Boot Manager floppy. So I was able to successfully install Fedora, but the next thing that needs doing is to rewire the drives and get them both to work.
It seems that I’m now on my way toward getting Fedora 7 up and running on my old PC. Fedora 7 became publicly available last Thursday, and I decided to download the install DVD image via a torrent provided through the Fedora Project site. I ran into a bit of a snag because I don’t know anything about my processor, aside from the fact that it was made by Intel (it’s a Pentium III). So when presented with a few different Fedora 7 installers to choose from, I wasn’t sure which to go with, until I made this (rather simple) discovery regarding i386 on Wikipedia:
The range of processors compatible with the 80386 is often collectively termed x86 or the i386 architecture; today, Intel prefers the name IA-32 however.
Problem solved. I downloaded the distribution and burned the rescue CD. I’m going to have to burn the full install DVD at work tomorrow, since I don’t have access to a DVD burner at the moment. But I was able to successfully run the rescue CD on my computer, using a Smart Boot Manager floppy; maybe I did retain something from my toils a few months ago.
The new foreseeable stumbling block, once I have the install DVD, is the fact that I think my DVD drive isn’t working. My tower has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner, but I could only get the rescue CD to load in the CD burner, which doesn’t load DVDs. So maybe I’ll need to fiddle around with the DVD drive before proceeding with the install, but I’ll leave that until another day.
UPDATE: D’oh. The above discussion of processor architecture and which distribution to install was way too complicated. As it turns out, this question is answered in its entirety on the first page of the Fedora install guide. Who would have thought?
Perhaps some of my “technical” difficulties could be easily solved with just a bit of tidying up. But perhaps not, and so, why risk it?
I see a pattern emerging with this blog: tinker around for a few hours, catch back up to where I left off last time, don’t do anything for a few months, forget everything. Last time I started tinkering around, I realized I couldn’t even remember my password to log into the distribution of Ubuntu that I have installed. This time around, it’s even worse. I still don’t know my password to the system, and it took me about 30 minutes to dig up my Wordpress login. In the process though, I upgraded to WP 2.2; hazah!
But I can safely say that the old pattern is about to change. I just got a new job, and I’m going to be working more with Linux than I ever have. So it’s crunch time. I bought the Linux Administration Handbook, and I’m actually planning on reading it, despite the pink cover. I’m also going to shift gears a bit and overwrite my copy of Ubuntu with Fedora 7, which is available for general release in just a few days. In the meantime, I have some reading to do.
So I started out this evening trying to configure a wireless network card for my old PC, which is now running a copy of Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I then realized that I can’t even log onto the computer because I forgot my username and password, and I can find that information by booting from an Ubuntu-live CD and then inspecting my auth logs.
I tried once to boot from the Ubuntu-live CD, and failed. I dug around online and found out how to access my machine’s BIOS by pressing the delete key at start-up. Then I checked the boot order, and saw that the system boots first from floppy, then CD-ROM, then hard drive. So really, it should have worked.
After more poking around, I looked in the install folder on my Ubuntu CD, and I found some useful information that led me to a website about Smart Boot Manager:
If your BIOS supposedly supports booting from a CD-ROM, but that feature isn’t working, this disk might be just what you need!
So then the next step was to create the SBM disk, which I eventually realized was pretty easy to do, using a utility called Rawrite32 for Windows (meaning, I had to run upstairs to my Mom’s PC, download the program, create the disk). I bet there’s another way to create a boot disk from a Mac, but mine doesn’t have a floppy drive anyway.
So after all of these diversions, I popped my new SBM disk into my floppy drive, and voila: I was able to run Ubuntu-live off of the CD. Now I just need to follow these instructions.
PS - Is it painfully apparent yet that this whole process is going to take me a long time?