vakkotaur | Entries tagged with wolvix

I'm finally installing Wolvix 1.1.0 on the laptop, after getting the latest GParted beta and repartitioning the laptop drive. All that is going slow, but it is going. And the Wolvix LiveCD even found a neighbor's unsecured wireless network and connected without my having to tweak anything.

I also tried Xubuntu. Or rather I tried to try it, and found it wouldn't boot. Evidently I have the hardware that reveals a nasty kernel bug in the latest Ubuntu. So much for trying that.

But the real downer is that I went looking to see if anyone managed to get the Cisco Aironet 350 working with WPA under Linux. Nobody has. A few, at least, have tried. Including a network engineer who knows from Linux and Cisco. Evidently the Aironet can do WPA if it has very recent firmware. Firmware that evidently doesn't work with the Linux driver, but only with the @$&! Windows driver... which doesn't work under ndiswrapper. Which means the card is not sufficiently supported to be fully useful. It's good enough for hotels and such, but that's it.

Anyone know of a wireless card (PCMCIA) with the following characteristics?:

1. Works under Linux natively (no ndiswrapper games).
2. Does WPA right out of the box.
3. Is inexpensive.

It looks like I get to go hunting for such a thing.

Current Mood: disappointed

Wolvix 1.1.0 has been out of beta for a while now and I finally got around to giving it a try in the LiveCD version on the laptop (Compaq Armada 7800, PII-266 192 MB RAM) and while it seems to work much like the installed 1.0.5 does there are a couple places where it doesn't work. One is sound, which isn't a big deal. While it would be nice to have sound, I seldom use it on the laptop and could do without it if need be. The other is WPA (which 1.0.5 doesn't do at all, at least not without lots of hoop-jumping) for wireless.

It's not that wireless doesn't work. Oh, no. Once I tell the system which ethernet interface to use, it will happily find a neighbor's unsecured network and use it, even if I don't tell it to go looking - though I can tell it to stop that and it will. What it won't do, as far as I can tell so far, is connect to the AirPort Express using WPA. Searching the web for solutions doesn't get my hopes up when I see a page proclaiming that Linux and the AirPort Express is a combination that doesn't work, even if he was trying to do more than simply connect. I knew it was time to take a break when I read "macoshints" as "masochist."

I am even starting to consider the use of Jay's older Apple laptop (12 inch PowerBook G4) as Apple stuff talks to Apple stuff just fine, of course. There are a few things holding me back on that, or at least making me nervous. I'd have to see about a proper trackball (the PowerBook will use an external pointer, but only via USB). I'd have to see what it would take to talk to the Canon PowerShot S410, which I suspect might not be too much. And then the thing really has me hesitating: Would I be stuck with Steve Job's idea of how things must look, complete with retina-searing white-hot backgrounds, or could I fix things to have a much more soothing experience?

I have installed Wolvix on percheron where it works quite well, but percheron isn't a laptop. It has a wired network connection and sound "just worked."

Current Mood: frustrated

I'm still considering what to replace Fedora Core with. There is the new Fedora which supposedly is a bit more usable, but likely still has the silly codec issues. And there is Ubuntu which has a very good ease of use, overall. There is Freespire which is now Ubuntu based and supposedly has no codec problems. There is also Wolvix, which is a customized version of Slackware.

( Musings and such )

Now I'm torn. I want to like Ubuntu, and I'm leery of running a Slackware based distribution as my main system. Yet it seems that if something needs to work, Wolvix lets me get the job done and Ubuntu... seems to get in the way. Now, it may be I was rushing and just wanted the problem fixed NOW and didn't use some Debianesque tool that would have taken care of things as I've avoided Debian style systems until Ubuntu. Of course, I could run Ubuntu and still have Wolvix around as I have two computers in the office. I have both now, but it's dual-boot so I can use one or the other at any given time. Decisive, aren't I?

A couple things are of interest to me in this week's DistroWatch Weekly. The first is open source advocate Eric S. Raymond switching to Ubuntu after over a decade of using RedHat/Fedora. I know where ESR is coming from on at least part of things. Fedora is a pain to set up to use the media codecs that people actually use. Ogg Vorbis might be be a great idea, but people actually use mp3. Ogg Theora might be a great idea, but people actually use .mov, .mpg, and .avi.

ESR has his detractors about this, but I see it as two camps. One, the one Fedora and Debian purists follow, is a nigh-on religious instance avoiding any and all formats even hinting of being proprietary. It's a nice idea, but it's not practical for most. Most people, as ESR realizes, just want things to work. This is the other camp, where practicality is a primary consideration.

People want the file(s) to play, not throw up error messages - and if they get an error message, they want to get it fixed. They do not want a sanctimonious lecture about how fixing it is evil.

Right now I am using Fedora myself. That's how I know how much 'fun' it is to get Fedora fully functional. Because I know that pain, I'm a version or two behind. I do not want to have to do all that work over again. I won't be jumping to Ubuntu right off, but I likely will give it or one of its derivatives (Kubuntu, or the newly Ubuntu-based Freespire when it is released) a try and see how things go.

While Fedora is my primary Linux distribution, I use another, lighter, distribution for older equipment, including the laptop. For a while this was Ultima Linux. When the Ultima site went away for several weeks (it's back now) I eventually switched to Wolvix.

When I noticed that the Ultima site was back, I suggested that the developer have a look at Wolvix as both are Slackware descendants and Wolvix had some good ideas worth adopting. The result of that also made it into this week's DistroWatch weekly with the news that Ultima and Wolvix have "joined forces." This doesn't mean that there will be just one (Ultima or Wolvix), but means that both distributions will benefit together.

I put Wolvix on percheron and got things set up about how I think they ought to be. There wasn't much to move off of percheron as the only thing on it besides a fresh Ultima install was a set of mp3 files made from tape, those being the result of using the Musix LiveCD.

That was a practice run for the laptop and it went fairly well. So after letting things sit for a day or so and one last boot into Ultima just to be sure I had everything off of caspian it was time to install Wolvix.

( Wolvix installs and tweaks )

Current Mood: geeky

( More on WiFi-Radar )

Current Mood: pleased

Wherein I relate more about wireless networking and WiFi Radar. Or rant about it.

( I'd RTFM, but there's no FM! )

Perserverance or cussed stubbornness?

( Details )

Current Mood: geeky

After many, many attempts to get Wolvix Linux to use a wireless connection and many, many utter failures to accomplish same, I think it's time to declare Wolvix "not ready for real world use." The Wolvix forum provided some help, but all I managed to get the lights to blink without getting a genuine connection. Wolvix was also not always launching the window manager fully, and didn't connect with a wired connection at first. It did eventually, so at least it seems possible to use it that way. That, however, is pretty useless when the places I'd use the laptop tend not to have sockets to plug into but only wireless access.

It is disappointing as overall Wolvix looks good. Too bad it doesn't seem to actually work.

I suppose, if nothing else, this at least means I won't have to put up with the GNU/ prefix silliness.

Current Mood: disappointed

The laptop I use currently has Ultima Linux on it. I am not providing a link to the Ultima site because it's not there anymore. I have been told by the maintainer that it will be back, eventually. I am at least one version behind, and now have no means of getting the more recent version. It's also been my experience with this sort of thing that 'eventually' tends to become 'never' and so now I again look for a distribution to run on the laptop.

( Zen? Not now. And Wolvix at the door. )