CoffeeBear.net

Sweet, Sweet Wireless Internet

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers

One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wed­ding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.¹ Since a wire­less router is use­less with­out some­thing to con­nect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Note­book Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night expe­ri­ence; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had Speed­Booster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.² I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burn­ing in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and imme­di­ately started muck­ing about with my lap­top to try to get it to work. In a pre­vi­ous fit of whim­sey, I had wiped M$ Win­dows from my lap­top and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a won­der­ful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the lap­top when­ever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wire­less net­work­ing run­ning on my lap­top was to run APT and grab all the lat­est stuff for SuSE 9.0.

For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Some­thing in my xserver con­fig­u­ra­tion (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fid­dled with it for a cou­ple of days, but had no luck in cor­rect­ing the prob­lem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some miss­ing soft­ware I needed to get the wire­less card to work, but the soft­ware was not listed in the APT repos­i­to­ries I was using. This is espe­cially prob­lem­atic as the CD-ROM in this lap­top tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my orig­i­nal CDs and load it from there. In the mean­time, I down­loaded the lat­est ver­sion of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this plan­ning on bor­row­ing the mod­u­lar CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell lap­top to replace SuSE on my lap­top (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wire­less net­work up & run­ning. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spin­dle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.

Much to my utter amaze­ment and total sur­prise, my lap­top decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu with­out error. It took sev­eral hours to do it, but even­tu­ally I was look­ing at an incred­i­bly ugly Ubuntu desk­top. This struck me as odd, but then I real­ized it was dis­play­ing at 800x600 when my laptop’s native res­o­lu­tion is 1024x768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was look­ing at the very pretty ver­sion of Ubuntu’s desk­top. About an hour later, after fol­low­ing these direc­tions in the Ndis­Wrap­per wiki, and I have wire­less net­work­ing run­ning on my lap­top. Now I just need to look into a 2nd bat­tery for the lap­top so I can have be a bit fur­ther away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not hav­ing to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the com­puter. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the liv­ing room to watch all my anime with. :)

Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure com­mand above, so I’ve edited this post to cor­rect it.

¹ Yes, I do real­ize that con­sid­er­ing this a lovely gift puts me com­pletely and for­ever in the “geek” cat­e­gory,
² The answers to those ques­tions were: No and Yes.

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