cjsimmons.net

have just spent the best part of about 4 hours installing ndiswrapper and a Netgear WG311v3 to a new PC running Ubuntu 8.10 x64 bit. All the turorials that I seemed to fine all mentioned the same way of going about to get this card up and running, but it wasn’t until not I came across a post somewhere saying to check ‘dsmeg’ and see what it say. There I found that it was saying that I’m running a 64 bit kernel, and the driver is only 32 bit, and that it was “bad magic”, lol!! Anyway, James Wilson has made some 64 bit drivers for this particular wifi card.

Many thanks to James for these drivers. I was starting to go nuts trying to get this card working. I have put this post up to help spread the word about these drivers, and show people that there is success on the horizon regarding this wifi card.

As per my last post, I’ve made the move to Linux. Previous attempts to move away from Windows to Linux have usually resulted in having to revert back cause I needed some program to do something, but since I last tried, Linux has come along way.

Anyway, I decided to give Linux another go as my WindowsXP install was getting rather slow, and was in need of a format and reinstall. My decided to go with Ubuntu as my chosen distribution as I’ve had previous use of it and found it to be rather easy to use. Rather then trying out the latest stable version, I decided to jump in head first and try out the latest beta 8.10 which from the Live CD seemed to have a lot better support for my hardware then the latest stable 8.04.

The main problem that was holding me back was to be able to stream media to my Xbox 360. Previously there were many ways to achieve this, but usually required some long confusing process that I never really wanted to try as I’m only a novice to Linux. Following this tutorial, I managed to get Ubuntu talking to my Xbox 360 just like in WindowsXP.

Wine is a great program for running some Windows program. uTorrent would have to be my favourite bittorrent program, but so far, everything I’ve seen for Linux comes no where near the feature of uTorrent. Using Wine, it is now possible for me to continue using uTorrent, and it works great!! Even the web interface works, so I can continue to check up on my downloads via my iPhone.

The only things that I haven’t tried much of is GIMP. I don’t really like it, but as Photoshop doesn’t run on Linux, I guess I’m stuck with it. I just have to work out how to use it.

Other then that, I can do everything that I previously could do in Windows, and it’s faster!! The only exception is that I cannot sync my iPhone3G as Apple haven’t made it possible. Hopefully this will change, but for now, I just use my Vista notebook with iTunes. So for now, I have no intentions of switching back to Windows any time soon for this PC. Besides, I still have my Vista notebook, should I need something.

What are your thoughts on Linux? Have you tried it? Have you made the switch?

For the last 4 days now, I have been running Ubuntu 8.10 Beta as my primary (and only) OS. WindowsXP has started to really slow down my machine, so much so, that it is more of a chore to use it, rather then a quick task to do something simple.

One major hurdle that was slowing down my move over, which could also through a spanner in the works and stop the whole move over (but is sorted out), was to stream media to my Xbox 360. I have seen numerous tutorials on how to achieve this, but also a lot of problems, so I was a little hesitant to make the move.

Anyway, I had a spare 120GB hard drive laying around, so I formatted it and installed Ubuntu on to it and set out on my quest to get Linux to do what I do in Windows. I’m now happy to say that this task is complete, mind you there was a few problems involved along the way.

The first problem that I had was that I wasn’t able to play any mp3’s, but as it turns out, this is very common with Linux, and you must install the relevant mp3 codecs for this to work. Sometimes simple, sometimes hard. In my case, it wasn’t fun. I had it working, then it stopped, then I done something, and it’s working again.

The other problem was with my displays. I run a dual screen setup, and this wasn’t an easy task. I managed to install the nVidia drivers, but they didn’t show the relevant screen resolutions for my displays. Up until now, I still have no idea how I’ve got it working (maybe a few reboots), but I’ve got dual 1280×1024 screens running, with compiz for some sexy eye candy and cube effects.

The last problem, that I’ve only just solved now, was that I couldn’t configure Samba (so Linux can talk to Windows). Turns out there is a bug in the current version of the config program, and would result in it crashing everytime I tried to change settings. I found a patch to my problem and had to rebuild the whole Samba config program (which was a cool lesson to learn), and now it’s all fine and dandy. My Windows PC’s can happily print to my printer which shared via Samba.

What I thought was going to be a huge process, but turned out to be very quick, what to enable Linux to stream media to my Xbox 360. I tried Twonky, but didn’t like the fact that it was a 30 trial, and had to pay about US$40 for it. I ended using this tutorial, which uses a modified version of ‘ushare’ to work with the Xbox 360. So far this is working great, but I haven’t tried it out extensivly of my library as yet.

I only have one task left, and that is to get my music from Linux over to my iPhone 3G. I’m thinking of using my Vista notebook and setting up the iTunes library to get it’s music from the Linux PC. Sounds simple in theroy, but who knows what problems I may encounter. Hopefully all goes well.

So, all up, I’ve got Linux running just how I want it to. It’s speedy, compared to WindowsXP, shares my printer to other Windows PC’s, and downloads torrents for me (though not automatically like utorrent for Windows does). The main thing that I’m happy about is that this PC is now really quick to use. Boot up times arn’t much different, but normal use once loaded is much quicker and snappier and is mainly what I was after. Oh, and I have installed WindowsXP in a virtual machine just incase I need Windows for something, but so far, I haven’t. Just more for toying around with at the moment.

Have you made the switch to Linux? Did you stay or go back to Windows and why? How was your experience with Linux?