I see; somewhere along the way I got it though my head that the "auto" lines where what Network-Manager used to determine control. This actually makes more sense. It still doesn't explain why lo wouldn't come up (since I never touch those lines), but I'd bet that it's related to me mutilating that file.
I love that page, it's one of the first pages I found when using Google to get help with this card. And of course the one part that would help me actually made me laugh out loud:
4.1.3. WPA info
Enter anything related to getting WPA to work (see WEP above)
That's the entire section. Awesome. Anyways. They also go over installing a new driver, the one that Ralink made for the chipset. The problem is, it does not support the Linux Wireless Extensions, which you need for wpasupplicant, xsupplicant, and lots of other Linux wireless tools out there. This is probably why there's not WPA info on that page, because you have to use Ralink's proprietary software to configure it, and it doesn't have enough flexibility to connect to the network I want anyways. There is an open source driver, but it's a long ways from usable. In fact, Ubuntu comes with a version of this driver that doesn't work.
My solution to all the driver issues with this card is to blacklist rt73usb (open source driver) and use ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. This gets me a Linux Wireless Extensions interface.
Now, the network I'm trying to connect to. It broadcasts it's SSID ("hornet"), it's EAP-TTLS and uses WPA for it's encryption scheme with TKIP. PAP is the phase2 authentication. The instructions are here, and instructions for a Mac are here. I find the Mac setup guide is more helpful than their very sketchy information. I have been able to get xsupplicant to the "authenticated" state, but can't get an IP (there's not actual data transfer occuring). I've had no luck getting wpasupplicant to do anything useful at all. My best guess is that using ndiswrapper is a huge no-no and I'm not going to win that way.
Frankly, I bought this card because it advertised it's Linux compatibility. If I had known the actual extent of it's "compatibility" (no Linux Wireless Extension support), I would have given it a pass.
Yeah, the fun thing is I bought this USB adapter to replace the internal instead. And I chose it in part because it claimed Linux compatibility. I can't take it back now, and unfortunately don't have the money to buy another adapter. So yes, if I had it to do over again I'd get an Intel card, but it's not an option now.
My main motivation to play with Feisty is I was hoping for updated versions of wpasupplicant and xsupplicant in the repositories - I hate having to compile and install that stuff myself, as it breaks things when the repository finally catches up with you. For me, I wanted to play with the new version and this represented a good reason to go do it.
But yes, I've had issues with hibernate, mostly related to the system acting like it's going to sleep and then waking up again. I feel that 7.04 (feisty) is faster to boot, and is definitely faster in general usage. This is on a Toshiba Portege 3500: Pentium M 1.33 GHz, 256 MB RAM, nothing special. I think some of this speed increase may be related to better drivers for my integrated Trident video card, as it seems mostly that redraws and scrolling is faster and takes less CPU, but that's just what it seems like to me. Also, in 6.10 (edgy) I added a line to modprobe.d/blacklist: "blacklist rt73usb," which prevented Ubuntu's built-in driver from loading when I plugged my wireless card in. This allowed me to use ndiswrapper to run the card instead. This no longer works in 7.04, and I don't know why. Also, the built-in driver for my card has apparently not been upgraded for this release, and it's broken in 6.10, has been for a while and is a known issue. Why they're not pulling in a newer version is beyond me.
All those issues aside, 7.04 is still beta. There's a good chance that all this will still be messed up when the final release comes around (7.04 is very close to release now, I think), but I'm thinking that some things, especially the hibernate issues come down to newer code that supports more hardware, but breaks some older stuff. In that respect, people like us are likely boned. Such is the difficulty of desktop operating systems.
If I'm understanding your correctly, I need to delete all the "auto" and "iface" lines for interfaces I want Network-Manager to control? If so, I haven't seen that documented anywhere, at least not in a form that I understood. Then again a lot of the instructions for wireless stuff is extremely esoteric to me and I may have missed it. Luckily, the formatting was related to driver for my wireless card, which is another issue altogether (I can't seem to blacklist rt73usb after upgrading to 7.10 beta [feisty] and not have it be used when I plug in my adapter, but that's another issue).
I never saw mine without those lines, so they were definitely there. I have since formatted and have a completely stock Ubuntu 6.10 (edgy) install here (so no Network-Manager), and those lines are definitely present already. The same lines also exist for eth0 (the wired interface), except it says "dhcp" instead of "loopback," obviously. I'll probably drop by the IRC channel sometime this weekend and see what can be done, though.
Intelsat has been accused of having business links with Hezbollah before, but claim that they are blameless this time and LTTE was using an empty transponder.
The best hackers are the ones that you don't even know are there. I'm betting that Intelsat still wouldn've let the broadcast, but there woulda been some money involved if it hadn't been hacked.
1.
Applications, Add/Remove Programs
2.
Find Network Manager in the Internet section
3.
Check the adjacent box to select Network Manager for installation
4.
Click OK
5.
Log out and back in again
6.
If you don't see the Network Manager icon you may need to add the Notification Area to your panel
Now, I used Synaptic, not the "Add-Remove Programs" thing, but I don't see anything that says I should need to configure it to bring up the "lo" network interface. That issue combined with the fact that Network-Manager actually made my wireless cards stop working convinced me that it's not really ready for primetime. And yes, I tested this in both 6.10 (edgy) and 7.04 (feisty). Honestly, the issue with bringing loopback up isn't a big deal to me, though - I can do "ifconfig lo up" and everything is OK after that. It's a good example of why I wouldn't be telling my mother to install it, though. Also of note is that Network-Manager doesn't have any provisions for Phase 2 Authentication at this time. That means that my school that uses PAP authentication (phase2="auth=PAP" is the line in wpasupplicant) is completely unsupported. As I said, they're working on it, but currently Network-Manager is very provisional, and I still can't get a proper driver for my card anyways.
All that said (damn I'm wordy tonight!) thanks for the suggestion. I really do like the way Network-Manager works, it's just not finished. I'll definitely be watching it, along with everything else the Ubuntu people are up to.
Thanks for the suggestion, but the driver will detect the dongle fine. It's actually an issue of "there just ain't a good driver." The driver that ships with Ubuntu 6.10 is an old, busted version of the open-source driver. I could just upgrade the driver, but it's only available through CVS. I'm not a developer, and know very little about CVS. It doesn't help that versions after December 2006 apparently have known issues, so you have pull from an older date in the CVS repository - I've got no idea how to do that. I could use the driver that Ralink made for the chipset, but it doesn't support the Linux Wireless Extensions (wext) (oddly enough, it's also full of bugs itself). It has it's own configuration utility. That means I don't get to use things like wpasupplicant or xsupplicant.
So, my solution is to use ndiswrapper and the Windows version of the driver. Ndiswrapper supports wext, so I've been trying to use wpasupplicant through that. This works well enough for access points that are open or just have WEP encryption, but completely fails to properly authenticate with my school's RADIUS server. I'd like to test WPA-PSK, but I don't have an access point that supports it. I don't know if I haven't set up my config file properly or what I'm trying to do just isn't supported.
The real crime here is advertising that the damn thing is "Linux Compatible." Yeah, you can use it under Linux, but it doesn't support the one standard that really matters (wext is how most of the newer wireless tools communicate and do their thing). For what it's worth, it works brilliantly with my school's network under Windows with SecureW2, so it should be possible to do it under Linux, I'm just not a huge guru that can make it work.
I recently installed 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my laptop, and I'm fairly surprised. The only things that didn't work right from the start were the digitizer (it's a tablet PC), and my USB wireless dongle. The digitizer isn't plug-and-play or anything like that, but the USB dongle is more of a mystery - it's claims Linux support, and it's even detected, but the included driver appears to be broken. The driver the manufacturer provides doesn't support anything in the standard manner (as far as WPA and various encryption stuff goes), so I'm using ndiswrapper for it right now. It works, but still won't work in encrypted modes. It uses a Ralink RT73 chipset, btw.
But hey, it got the old internal wireless card perfectly. It only supports WEP though. It also got the video card (and I can change resolutions in an applet!), sound card, USB hubs, my external USB DVD-RW (and it hotplugs!), and so on. It'll even hotplug the USB wireless dongle, with ndiswrapper - I full expected that to not work. So we're not getting 100% success, but it's entirely possible that you could install Linux and never touch a config file. That's how you do desktop.
Honestly, my biggest complaint now is that WPA and connecting to weird RADIUS servers run by universities and the like is still a royal pain. I tried Network-Manager (a Gnome applet) and it did all kinds of bad stuff to my system (loopback never came up), and didn't help me connect to encrypted networks at all. But, they're working on it. If this is the worst complaint I can muster, we've come a long way.
Re:Does anyone even use this OS?
on
CentOS 5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
We use Cent where I work. There's a special "Server" CD that strips out pretty much everything that's not a major requirement. I think they're taking the same path that Microsoft has with Windows: you put one version on the server, and another version on the client, and it's all tested to work very well together. In that respect, Compiz on the client might be considered a feature.
I work as an RA on my campus, and we speak with the campus police force often. On our small campus of ~4000 students, we have at least one detective and probably 10 officers that I know of. And they're not just rent-a-cops. They're real, badge-carrying officers from the city police force. Salaries are paid from the campus operating budget I believe.
Back on topic, my school is downright draconian on what's allowed on the residential side of their network (the campus network is separate). They block anything bandwidth intensive, from Youtube to videos on Apple's website. FTP is throttled to 0.1 KB/sec. Absolutely NO access to SMTP (can't send mail except through their shitty webmail client), and POP3 is throttled back to dialup speeds. ICMP is dropped - don't ping anything because it'll never come back anyways (it's not even bandwidth intensive, WTF!). In fact they do so much throttling that we almost never run out of bandwidth; the pack shaper gives out long before that. It's a consistent point of contention between the residents and the school, as many residents play games online in their spare time. The latency is consistently measured in seconds. Oh, and if you request a file that ends in ".torrent" over HTTP, the file will never finish downloading.
The solution? I use TOR for anything that won't load. It's slow, but not much slower than my school during peak hours. I just stick it in a tab and let it go.
There are many many great HL mods out there, a number of which you could pick out for this list
TFC was my first truly online game. I had played some direct connect, network, and so on, but it was the first time I'd ever seen a server browser. However, I think we need to be more general than this. You mention that there are many excellent HL mods. In fact, there's something for just about everyone. Even if the original game didn't strike your fancy, it is the strongest proof of one thing: the community is important. They can take your average shooter and turn it into something everyone will buy. And if you happen to have a very good game on your hands, like HL, making it easy to mod will ensure that it still sells years after it's release.
So, all the next gen systems are going to have USB ports, right? And the PS2 has them as well. So, why are they making guitars that only work with one system? I would really love to just be able to pick up any two guitars and have a multiplayer game. I play Guitar Hero sometimes with friends, but we only have one controller. The other day I was in Best Buy and they had two controllers hooked up. That's probably the most fun I've had with a video game recently.
I really thought the N64 was a fun system. For many years I got a game for my birthday and a game for christmas, and built up a pretty decent library. Honestly, I can't say that the single player was worth repeating in many of those games. But, the multiplayer almost always shined, at least with the games I bought. Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Starfox, Perfect Dark, and more were just really, really fun when you could get lots people to play with you, which was easy for me since I had 3 siblings.
The system did have it's problems, but every system does. The controller was "weird" at best, and it was pretty expensive. It was also hard to separate the crap from the games you'd want to buy. I managed about 20 games before the system went out of date, but man it took some looking. You also saw a lot of experimental games on the N64, which were later refined for next gen systems. Harvest Moon wasn't a great game, but it was intresting. I've heard there's a Gamecube version of the game. I'd like to see how that shaped up sometime.
Then again, the N64 was the last console I bought. I didn't buy a gamecube, any portable systems, nothing. So, I may be little biased towards the 64, especially since I still play it. I have a computer. It's not the fastest, but the video card cost me less than a console and graphics look at least as good. I don't count the entire cost of the computer, because the rest of the hardware I'd have anyways.
Gentoo's a bit harder than other distros I've tried, for sure. But I'm not exactly a Linux expert and managed to get it installed. Heck, with nothing more than the default install instructions I managed to dual boot it with my Windows install. It did take a while my first time through - 3 days actually sounds about right, but I could do it again in probably a few hours, not counting compile time.
In fact my biggest difficulties installing Gentoo are pretty much common to all Linux distros I've tried. The xorg.conf is an awful sore, and of course none of the config programs will read my monitor's information properly. Ironically, Linux leaves me whishing I had a static IP, becuase that's easier to configure than DHCP. Installing video drives for my ATI card is difficult, requires I do further editing to the xorg.conf, and generally crashes X with really crypic error messages when I don't set it up right. Then there's sound, making hotplug work for USB devices (USB DVD burners are kinda hard, actually), and all those other little pieces of fun.
As a noob, I hate hearing the people who know this stuff (Slashdotters especially) say "it's not hard, rtfm noob!" But in this case, the install is harder than a "normal" Linux distro, but this noob got it installed, and all I did was follow the manual pretty much word for word.
The problem with the ever-evolving hardware is that developers no longer know what they can assume. Let's say that this year's PS3 model doubles the capacity of the hard disk. That might be a nice feature - you can have more save points in games, or perhpas cache more of the game to the drive, or whatever. When game developers start picking up on this and savegames and such start taking twice as much space (or more), what happens to the owners of older models? It might still work, but they'll end up making space by deleting other savegames. Their game may end up with extremely slow load times, because they can't cache as much of a game.
An even better example would be an upgrade to the graphics capabilities. Nintendo did this with the 64, through that expansion pack. Since it came relatively late in the game, only a few games used it at all, but let's imagine that the PS3 gets a graphics upgrade two years after it comes out. Well, at that point, you'll start seeing games that run poorly or not at all on the older model systems. As time goes on, less of the new additions to the library would work with your outdated system.
I can imagine a situation where PS3 games would have minimum system requirements printed on the box. That would be fun; the Jonses really give a shit about how much RAM their Playstation has. On the developer side, you end up writing two different graphics paths (or caching algorithms, etc), just like you do for a PC (although some PC engines have many more than two paths) to accomodate those oddball PS3s that came out a long time ago. Or perhaps, you as a developer just don't want to screw with it and don't support those old PS3s at all. Most places won't refund your money after you open a game, something I doubt the Jonses would be happy with after finding out that their PS3 doesn't support this game. These issues have been the historic weakness of PC gaming: it requires some technical knowledge, you have to support multiple pieces of hardware, and you end up alienating some of your audience that doesn't have the proper hardware.
If you're willing to brave those typical PC issues, why not just get a PC? At $600, you could probably build something comparable.
Yes, it's a computer in the sense that many electronic devices are computers. But using it as a generic, programmable tool may be less than intuitive. Frankly, Sony's destroying the one benefit a console ever had: the hardware was standardized. You didn't need to run though installs, and just about anyone could put in a game in play it with absolutely no issues. How long until a game is released that has a "glitch" and doesn't work with some of the older generation PS3s? Patches, moving hardware targets, and obsolete a few years down the road? Sounds like a system I just bought, and it is a computer, in the sense that I usually think of a computer. It cost me less than a PS3 too.
And yes, I know there were different versions of the PS2, something like 15 of the damn things. As far as I know, 14 of those reworked the hardware to stop you from being able to execute your own arbitrary code. Number 15 was the "slim" model. I don't think any of them changed anything fundamental about the system itself (clock speeds, drive sizes, etc).
Oddly enough, I just picked up a PS2 out of the trash about a month back. It was in pretty bad condition, but after a few hours working on it, it kinda works. I figured I'd buy a game or two for it. A look at the selection surprised me. I'd already played everything I was intrested in on my PC, or could buy it cheaper on my PC. One could argue that with the PS2 version, it's guaranteed to work, I just pop it in and play. For someone like me that's not much of a selling point, but for my less technically inclined family, it's probably great. So, what's the benefit of a PS3?
Quite frankly, I feel that 30% understates how slow some laptops feel because of their slow hard drives. I don't really consider myself to be terribly impatient, but a fast hard drive is the best reason I can think of to use a desktop whenever possible. However much as these drives bother me, they do have thier merits. The 4200 RPM drives consume noticeably less power, and are much cheaper, though capacity still has more sway on the bottom line.
There's a nice middle ground for laptops, I think. When my 4200 RPM drive in my laptop died 6 months back, I replaced with a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive with a 16 MB cache. It does reduce my battery power slightly, but the faster spindle and enormous cache make it worth the loss for me. At the time, it was one of the cheapest drives listed on Newegg at $70 shipped. Considering that even the cheapest 20 GB 4200 RPM/2 MB cache drives are $60 shipped, I'd call what I got a good deal.
As I've had it explained to me, these tiny little earbuds cause large spikes in pressure - espicially when they're turned up to high volumes, and this pressure doesn't escape. The same also applies to sealed headphones. For true bassheads, this pressure buildup is a good thing as it helps with bass response. It also damages the little bits in your ears. The solution (assuming that turning your music down isn't too much to ask, 115 db is deafening no matter what you're listening to) is to buy open-aire phones. Of course, some people don't like those because their loud music "leaks" out and bothers others around them. And it's harder to get really loud bass response out of them. I'm not an expert on any of this, but I bought myself headphones for christmas this year, so I've been reading a bit.
Not surprisingly, sealed headphones and earbuds are also responsible for many ear infections. That one I'm pretty sure of.
Paid distros? Man, we're having trouble getting people to use it when it's free. It's perfectly valid to discuss free distros in this, because your average person prefers to pay $80-$200 for a copy of Windows over using a free copy of Linux. Why? Because for all the flexability and power Linux gives you, it's hard to use. I'll say that again: Linux is harder to use. Yes, it can do more, but that doesn't even matter at this point. Linux does everything it needs to for a desktop already.
And I'm not talking about distros from years gone by, I'm talking about recent distros like Unbuntu 5 (Warty Warthog). I know it seems like I keep picking on Unbuntu, but it's only because it's meant to be a nice desktop OS (as opposed to a server solution or a more rounded do-what-you-want type distro).
As for supported hardware, it's highly unlikely that there's many computers around composed solely of hardware on a given support list. Additionally, it's not that there's no support for certain hardware, it how hard it is to get that support working.
My point is not to spread FUD and troll, though I realize that some of what I said is highly abrasive. I wouldn't be writing any of this if I didn't want to see Linux truly take off on desktops. I just feel that the community is trying to sell the wrong features. This market isn't looking for power and flexability - those are bonuses at best. Ease of use is king in the desktop market and everyone's going to have to get out of the server mindset if they want this to work.
Last I checked, I didn't need a codec for uncompressed AVI. And there are open source versions of many codecs. Also, I'm fairly certain that the codecs are in the distro, and probably even set up properly. The problem is that any video I play is met with a nasty error message. I never did get to the bottom of that problem, but I'm guessing that it had something to do with overlay and render targets and (surpise) my video card driver. And that was part of my default install. I'm pretty good a breaking stuff, but I hate it when it's broken before I even get a chance to play with it.
Six hours downloading a 30 meg driver? Sounds like you're more frustrated with your dialup (not that I blame you). I'll acknowledge that 30 megs for a sound driver is rather extreme. But I have DSL and my biggest problem isn't that I have to download drivers (I'll probably end up doing that for both Linux and Windows anyways, since I like everything all fresh and new like that) it's how long and obscure the install and config is. I guarantee you it may have taken hours to download all the crap you needed, but it installed extra quick without you having to do much more than click a few buttons.
I should start by saying that I use Windows on my primary desktop. For a while, I really tried to switch to Linux - Unbuntu, Mandrake, Slackware, and Fedora have all been on my box at one time or another. For the most part, getting the OS installed isn't rocket science. What is difficult is working around all the crap once you get a Linux distro installed.
Getting the desktop to look like anything except blurry ass requires an hour of reading about how to install your video drivers. Why? Because after installing your package using the really nice script, it still doesn't work. So you google again and figure out you need to edit that ghastly xorg.conf file. And then Google to figure out why the resolution is stuck. And then Googling again to figure out why the refresh is stuck at 54 Hz and giving you a massive headache. Dual monitors? TV out? You may as well just go cry yourself to sleep unless you're an uber-leet nerd, because that stuff takes hours to set up. That shit is a matter of one click in Windows; my mother can do it.
Then there's networking. Support for your wireless adapter may or may not even exist. If it does, it's probably in one of the generic Prism2 drivers or something like that. Great, but it doesn't help me a whole damn lot - mine says Netgear on the front. Back to Google again. It's also intresting to note that Linux's DHCP client and the server in my Linksys didn't get along real well, even on a wired connection. There's no way someone who doesn't know how that crap works would be able to troubleshoot that.
Of course, there's always multimedia playback, right? The install I liked best so far, Unbuntu, couldn't play anything out of the box. I know it should have been able to, but for whatever reason my install was futzed no matter how many times I reinstalled it. I never could figure out how to make it play videos. There were several settings for decoding and such (as well as about 10 different players to choose from), but nothing seemed to change no matter how I tinkered with those settings. Oh, and Unbuntu comes with several options for audio input and output including ALSA and ESD. WTF is the difference? I've heard of ALSA before so I'll use that one. Oh wait, that one doesn't work, but the ESD one does. Well, as long as I hear sound I don't really care. At this point, I don't even want to Google it.
This is why there aren't more Linux desktops: there are severe usability issues. I find it easier to get a webserver complete with PHP and MySQL up and running on Linux than a desktop. Why? Because I don't need video drivers, audio, or wireless networking. I also don't change my server hardware every month or two. Linux makes a great server, for sure. But as great a server as it is, it's a shitty desktop. And you'll please excuse my anger, I just got finished configuring my Linux install and promptly broke it...again.
Here's what desktop distros should be working on:
-When it says it's installed, it'd better work (video drivers)
-Drop the funny names. Yes it's superficial and shouldn't matter, but it does.
-Make the defaults work. If the driver's there, the comptuer should play sound. And it should always be able to play video out of the box. And at least try to support the mouse wheel. I use mine a lot, and they come on every modern mouse. Why do I need to Google to figure out how to make it work in Linux?
-Where possible, make it one click. Things like multiple displays shouldn't be so hard. Things like resolution and color depth should be changeable in an applet, not a config file.
If a luser asks how to do something and your response is to call them a retard and tell to open up a terminal, your software's fucked. Lusers don't ask hard questions, which means that what they're asking for is a fundamental basic. And you just buried it under a shitload of command line.
I freqently dump my virtual carts or put them on hold and come back to them later. Often, I dump a cart because, surprise surprise, I have to put in my credit card info before seeing the total to be charged. Not on my watch.
I understand many places calculate shipping in the cart because of combined shipping rates, and that's fine. A bit annoying, but fine. But asking me to commit before I know what I've committed to doesn't sit well.
Slashdot Mirror
I see; somewhere along the way I got it though my head that the "auto" lines where what Network-Manager used to determine control. This actually makes more sense. It still doesn't explain why lo wouldn't come up (since I never touch those lines), but I'd bet that it's related to me mutilating that file.
My solution to all the driver issues with this card is to blacklist rt73usb (open source driver) and use ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. This gets me a Linux Wireless Extensions interface.
Now, the network I'm trying to connect to. It broadcasts it's SSID ("hornet"), it's EAP-TTLS and uses WPA for it's encryption scheme with TKIP. PAP is the phase2 authentication. The instructions are here, and instructions for a Mac are here. I find the Mac setup guide is more helpful than their very sketchy information. I have been able to get xsupplicant to the "authenticated" state, but can't get an IP (there's not actual data transfer occuring). I've had no luck getting wpasupplicant to do anything useful at all. My best guess is that using ndiswrapper is a huge no-no and I'm not going to win that way.
Frankly, I bought this card because it advertised it's Linux compatibility. If I had known the actual extent of it's "compatibility" (no Linux Wireless Extension support), I would have given it a pass.
Yeah, the fun thing is I bought this USB adapter to replace the internal instead. And I chose it in part because it claimed Linux compatibility. I can't take it back now, and unfortunately don't have the money to buy another adapter. So yes, if I had it to do over again I'd get an Intel card, but it's not an option now.
My main motivation to play with Feisty is I was hoping for updated versions of wpasupplicant and xsupplicant in the repositories - I hate having to compile and install that stuff myself, as it breaks things when the repository finally catches up with you. For me, I wanted to play with the new version and this represented a good reason to go do it.
But yes, I've had issues with hibernate, mostly related to the system acting like it's going to sleep and then waking up again. I feel that 7.04 (feisty) is faster to boot, and is definitely faster in general usage. This is on a Toshiba Portege 3500: Pentium M 1.33 GHz, 256 MB RAM, nothing special. I think some of this speed increase may be related to better drivers for my integrated Trident video card, as it seems mostly that redraws and scrolling is faster and takes less CPU, but that's just what it seems like to me. Also, in 6.10 (edgy) I added a line to modprobe.d/blacklist: "blacklist rt73usb," which prevented Ubuntu's built-in driver from loading when I plugged my wireless card in. This allowed me to use ndiswrapper to run the card instead. This no longer works in 7.04, and I don't know why. Also, the built-in driver for my card has apparently not been upgraded for this release, and it's broken in 6.10, has been for a while and is a known issue. Why they're not pulling in a newer version is beyond me.
All those issues aside, 7.04 is still beta. There's a good chance that all this will still be messed up when the final release comes around (7.04 is very close to release now, I think), but I'm thinking that some things, especially the hibernate issues come down to newer code that supports more hardware, but breaks some older stuff. In that respect, people like us are likely boned. Such is the difficulty of desktop operating systems.
If I'm understanding your correctly, I need to delete all the "auto" and "iface" lines for interfaces I want Network-Manager to control? If so, I haven't seen that documented anywhere, at least not in a form that I understood. Then again a lot of the instructions for wireless stuff is extremely esoteric to me and I may have missed it. Luckily, the formatting was related to driver for my wireless card, which is another issue altogether (I can't seem to blacklist rt73usb after upgrading to 7.10 beta [feisty] and not have it be used when I plug in my adapter, but that's another issue).
I never saw mine without those lines, so they were definitely there. I have since formatted and have a completely stock Ubuntu 6.10 (edgy) install here (so no Network-Manager), and those lines are definitely present already. The same lines also exist for eth0 (the wired interface), except it says "dhcp" instead of "loopback," obviously. I'll probably drop by the IRC channel sometime this weekend and see what can be done, though.
All that said (damn I'm wordy tonight!) thanks for the suggestion. I really do like the way Network-Manager works, it's just not finished. I'll definitely be watching it, along with everything else the Ubuntu people are up to.
Thanks for the suggestion, but the driver will detect the dongle fine. It's actually an issue of "there just ain't a good driver." The driver that ships with Ubuntu 6.10 is an old, busted version of the open-source driver. I could just upgrade the driver, but it's only available through CVS. I'm not a developer, and know very little about CVS. It doesn't help that versions after December 2006 apparently have known issues, so you have pull from an older date in the CVS repository - I've got no idea how to do that. I could use the driver that Ralink made for the chipset, but it doesn't support the Linux Wireless Extensions (wext) (oddly enough, it's also full of bugs itself). It has it's own configuration utility. That means I don't get to use things like wpasupplicant or xsupplicant.
So, my solution is to use ndiswrapper and the Windows version of the driver. Ndiswrapper supports wext, so I've been trying to use wpasupplicant through that. This works well enough for access points that are open or just have WEP encryption, but completely fails to properly authenticate with my school's RADIUS server. I'd like to test WPA-PSK, but I don't have an access point that supports it. I don't know if I haven't set up my config file properly or what I'm trying to do just isn't supported.
The real crime here is advertising that the damn thing is "Linux Compatible." Yeah, you can use it under Linux, but it doesn't support the one standard that really matters (wext is how most of the newer wireless tools communicate and do their thing). For what it's worth, it works brilliantly with my school's network under Windows with SecureW2, so it should be possible to do it under Linux, I'm just not a huge guru that can make it work.
I recently installed 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my laptop, and I'm fairly surprised. The only things that didn't work right from the start were the digitizer (it's a tablet PC), and my USB wireless dongle. The digitizer isn't plug-and-play or anything like that, but the USB dongle is more of a mystery - it's claims Linux support, and it's even detected, but the included driver appears to be broken. The driver the manufacturer provides doesn't support anything in the standard manner (as far as WPA and various encryption stuff goes), so I'm using ndiswrapper for it right now. It works, but still won't work in encrypted modes. It uses a Ralink RT73 chipset, btw.
But hey, it got the old internal wireless card perfectly. It only supports WEP though. It also got the video card (and I can change resolutions in an applet!), sound card, USB hubs, my external USB DVD-RW (and it hotplugs!), and so on. It'll even hotplug the USB wireless dongle, with ndiswrapper - I full expected that to not work. So we're not getting 100% success, but it's entirely possible that you could install Linux and never touch a config file. That's how you do desktop.
Honestly, my biggest complaint now is that WPA and connecting to weird RADIUS servers run by universities and the like is still a royal pain. I tried Network-Manager (a Gnome applet) and it did all kinds of bad stuff to my system (loopback never came up), and didn't help me connect to encrypted networks at all. But, they're working on it. If this is the worst complaint I can muster, we've come a long way.
We use Cent where I work. There's a special "Server" CD that strips out pretty much everything that's not a major requirement. I think they're taking the same path that Microsoft has with Windows: you put one version on the server, and another version on the client, and it's all tested to work very well together. In that respect, Compiz on the client might be considered a feature.
I work as an RA on my campus, and we speak with the campus police force often. On our small campus of ~4000 students, we have at least one detective and probably 10 officers that I know of. And they're not just rent-a-cops. They're real, badge-carrying officers from the city police force. Salaries are paid from the campus operating budget I believe.
Back on topic, my school is downright draconian on what's allowed on the residential side of their network (the campus network is separate). They block anything bandwidth intensive, from Youtube to videos on Apple's website. FTP is throttled to 0.1 KB/sec. Absolutely NO access to SMTP (can't send mail except through their shitty webmail client), and POP3 is throttled back to dialup speeds. ICMP is dropped - don't ping anything because it'll never come back anyways (it's not even bandwidth intensive, WTF!). In fact they do so much throttling that we almost never run out of bandwidth; the pack shaper gives out long before that. It's a consistent point of contention between the residents and the school, as many residents play games online in their spare time. The latency is consistently measured in seconds. Oh, and if you request a file that ends in ".torrent" over HTTP, the file will never finish downloading.
The solution? I use TOR for anything that won't load. It's slow, but not much slower than my school during peak hours. I just stick it in a tab and let it go.
So, all the next gen systems are going to have USB ports, right? And the PS2 has them as well. So, why are they making guitars that only work with one system? I would really love to just be able to pick up any two guitars and have a multiplayer game. I play Guitar Hero sometimes with friends, but we only have one controller. The other day I was in Best Buy and they had two controllers hooked up. That's probably the most fun I've had with a video game recently.
I really thought the N64 was a fun system. For many years I got a game for my birthday and a game for christmas, and built up a pretty decent library. Honestly, I can't say that the single player was worth repeating in many of those games. But, the multiplayer almost always shined, at least with the games I bought. Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Starfox, Perfect Dark, and more were just really, really fun when you could get lots people to play with you, which was easy for me since I had 3 siblings.
The system did have it's problems, but every system does. The controller was "weird" at best, and it was pretty expensive. It was also hard to separate the crap from the games you'd want to buy. I managed about 20 games before the system went out of date, but man it took some looking. You also saw a lot of experimental games on the N64, which were later refined for next gen systems. Harvest Moon wasn't a great game, but it was intresting. I've heard there's a Gamecube version of the game. I'd like to see how that shaped up sometime.
Then again, the N64 was the last console I bought. I didn't buy a gamecube, any portable systems, nothing. So, I may be little biased towards the 64, especially since I still play it. I have a computer. It's not the fastest, but the video card cost me less than a console and graphics look at least as good. I don't count the entire cost of the computer, because the rest of the hardware I'd have anyways.
Gentoo's a bit harder than other distros I've tried, for sure. But I'm not exactly a Linux expert and managed to get it installed. Heck, with nothing more than the default install instructions I managed to dual boot it with my Windows install. It did take a while my first time through - 3 days actually sounds about right, but I could do it again in probably a few hours, not counting compile time.
In fact my biggest difficulties installing Gentoo are pretty much common to all Linux distros I've tried. The xorg.conf is an awful sore, and of course none of the config programs will read my monitor's information properly. Ironically, Linux leaves me whishing I had a static IP, becuase that's easier to configure than DHCP. Installing video drives for my ATI card is difficult, requires I do further editing to the xorg.conf, and generally crashes X with really crypic error messages when I don't set it up right. Then there's sound, making hotplug work for USB devices (USB DVD burners are kinda hard, actually), and all those other little pieces of fun.
As a noob, I hate hearing the people who know this stuff (Slashdotters especially) say "it's not hard, rtfm noob!" But in this case, the install is harder than a "normal" Linux distro, but this noob got it installed, and all I did was follow the manual pretty much word for word.
The problem with the ever-evolving hardware is that developers no longer know what they can assume. Let's say that this year's PS3 model doubles the capacity of the hard disk. That might be a nice feature - you can have more save points in games, or perhpas cache more of the game to the drive, or whatever. When game developers start picking up on this and savegames and such start taking twice as much space (or more), what happens to the owners of older models? It might still work, but they'll end up making space by deleting other savegames. Their game may end up with extremely slow load times, because they can't cache as much of a game.
An even better example would be an upgrade to the graphics capabilities. Nintendo did this with the 64, through that expansion pack. Since it came relatively late in the game, only a few games used it at all, but let's imagine that the PS3 gets a graphics upgrade two years after it comes out. Well, at that point, you'll start seeing games that run poorly or not at all on the older model systems. As time goes on, less of the new additions to the library would work with your outdated system.
I can imagine a situation where PS3 games would have minimum system requirements printed on the box. That would be fun; the Jonses really give a shit about how much RAM their Playstation has. On the developer side, you end up writing two different graphics paths (or caching algorithms, etc), just like you do for a PC (although some PC engines have many more than two paths) to accomodate those oddball PS3s that came out a long time ago. Or perhaps, you as a developer just don't want to screw with it and don't support those old PS3s at all. Most places won't refund your money after you open a game, something I doubt the Jonses would be happy with after finding out that their PS3 doesn't support this game. These issues have been the historic weakness of PC gaming: it requires some technical knowledge, you have to support multiple pieces of hardware, and you end up alienating some of your audience that doesn't have the proper hardware.
If you're willing to brave those typical PC issues, why not just get a PC? At $600, you could probably build something comparable.
Yes, it's a computer in the sense that many electronic devices are computers. But using it as a generic, programmable tool may be less than intuitive. Frankly, Sony's destroying the one benefit a console ever had: the hardware was standardized. You didn't need to run though installs, and just about anyone could put in a game in play it with absolutely no issues. How long until a game is released that has a "glitch" and doesn't work with some of the older generation PS3s? Patches, moving hardware targets, and obsolete a few years down the road? Sounds like a system I just bought, and it is a computer, in the sense that I usually think of a computer. It cost me less than a PS3 too.
And yes, I know there were different versions of the PS2, something like 15 of the damn things. As far as I know, 14 of those reworked the hardware to stop you from being able to execute your own arbitrary code. Number 15 was the "slim" model. I don't think any of them changed anything fundamental about the system itself (clock speeds, drive sizes, etc).
Oddly enough, I just picked up a PS2 out of the trash about a month back. It was in pretty bad condition, but after a few hours working on it, it kinda works. I figured I'd buy a game or two for it. A look at the selection surprised me. I'd already played everything I was intrested in on my PC, or could buy it cheaper on my PC. One could argue that with the PS2 version, it's guaranteed to work, I just pop it in and play. For someone like me that's not much of a selling point, but for my less technically inclined family, it's probably great. So, what's the benefit of a PS3?
Quite frankly, I feel that 30% understates how slow some laptops feel because of their slow hard drives. I don't really consider myself to be terribly impatient, but a fast hard drive is the best reason I can think of to use a desktop whenever possible. However much as these drives bother me, they do have thier merits. The 4200 RPM drives consume noticeably less power, and are much cheaper, though capacity still has more sway on the bottom line.
There's a nice middle ground for laptops, I think. When my 4200 RPM drive in my laptop died 6 months back, I replaced with a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive with a 16 MB cache. It does reduce my battery power slightly, but the faster spindle and enormous cache make it worth the loss for me. At the time, it was one of the cheapest drives listed on Newegg at $70 shipped. Considering that even the cheapest 20 GB 4200 RPM/2 MB cache drives are $60 shipped, I'd call what I got a good deal.
As I've had it explained to me, these tiny little earbuds cause large spikes in pressure - espicially when they're turned up to high volumes, and this pressure doesn't escape. The same also applies to sealed headphones. For true bassheads, this pressure buildup is a good thing as it helps with bass response. It also damages the little bits in your ears. The solution (assuming that turning your music down isn't too much to ask, 115 db is deafening no matter what you're listening to) is to buy open-aire phones. Of course, some people don't like those because their loud music "leaks" out and bothers others around them. And it's harder to get really loud bass response out of them. I'm not an expert on any of this, but I bought myself headphones for christmas this year, so I've been reading a bit.
Not surprisingly, sealed headphones and earbuds are also responsible for many ear infections. That one I'm pretty sure of.
Paid distros? Man, we're having trouble getting people to use it when it's free. It's perfectly valid to discuss free distros in this, because your average person prefers to pay $80-$200 for a copy of Windows over using a free copy of Linux. Why? Because for all the flexability and power Linux gives you, it's hard to use. I'll say that again: Linux is harder to use. Yes, it can do more, but that doesn't even matter at this point. Linux does everything it needs to for a desktop already.
And I'm not talking about distros from years gone by, I'm talking about recent distros like Unbuntu 5 (Warty Warthog). I know it seems like I keep picking on Unbuntu, but it's only because it's meant to be a nice desktop OS (as opposed to a server solution or a more rounded do-what-you-want type distro).
As for supported hardware, it's highly unlikely that there's many computers around composed solely of hardware on a given support list. Additionally, it's not that there's no support for certain hardware, it how hard it is to get that support working.
My point is not to spread FUD and troll, though I realize that some of what I said is highly abrasive. I wouldn't be writing any of this if I didn't want to see Linux truly take off on desktops. I just feel that the community is trying to sell the wrong features. This market isn't looking for power and flexability - those are bonuses at best. Ease of use is king in the desktop market and everyone's going to have to get out of the server mindset if they want this to work.
Last I checked, I didn't need a codec for uncompressed AVI. And there are open source versions of many codecs. Also, I'm fairly certain that the codecs are in the distro, and probably even set up properly. The problem is that any video I play is met with a nasty error message. I never did get to the bottom of that problem, but I'm guessing that it had something to do with overlay and render targets and (surpise) my video card driver. And that was part of my default install. I'm pretty good a breaking stuff, but I hate it when it's broken before I even get a chance to play with it.
Six hours downloading a 30 meg driver? Sounds like you're more frustrated with your dialup (not that I blame you). I'll acknowledge that 30 megs for a sound driver is rather extreme. But I have DSL and my biggest problem isn't that I have to download drivers (I'll probably end up doing that for both Linux and Windows anyways, since I like everything all fresh and new like that) it's how long and obscure the install and config is. I guarantee you it may have taken hours to download all the crap you needed, but it installed extra quick without you having to do much more than click a few buttons.
Getting the desktop to look like anything except blurry ass requires an hour of reading about how to install your video drivers. Why? Because after installing your package using the really nice script, it still doesn't work. So you google again and figure out you need to edit that ghastly xorg.conf file. And then Google to figure out why the resolution is stuck. And then Googling again to figure out why the refresh is stuck at 54 Hz and giving you a massive headache. Dual monitors? TV out? You may as well just go cry yourself to sleep unless you're an uber-leet nerd, because that stuff takes hours to set up. That shit is a matter of one click in Windows; my mother can do it.
Then there's networking. Support for your wireless adapter may or may not even exist. If it does, it's probably in one of the generic Prism2 drivers or something like that. Great, but it doesn't help me a whole damn lot - mine says Netgear on the front. Back to Google again. It's also intresting to note that Linux's DHCP client and the server in my Linksys didn't get along real well, even on a wired connection. There's no way someone who doesn't know how that crap works would be able to troubleshoot that.
Of course, there's always multimedia playback, right? The install I liked best so far, Unbuntu, couldn't play anything out of the box. I know it should have been able to, but for whatever reason my install was futzed no matter how many times I reinstalled it. I never could figure out how to make it play videos. There were several settings for decoding and such (as well as about 10 different players to choose from), but nothing seemed to change no matter how I tinkered with those settings. Oh, and Unbuntu comes with several options for audio input and output including ALSA and ESD. WTF is the difference? I've heard of ALSA before so I'll use that one. Oh wait, that one doesn't work, but the ESD one does. Well, as long as I hear sound I don't really care. At this point, I don't even want to Google it.
This is why there aren't more Linux desktops: there are severe usability issues. I find it easier to get a webserver complete with PHP and MySQL up and running on Linux than a desktop. Why? Because I don't need video drivers, audio, or wireless networking. I also don't change my server hardware every month or two. Linux makes a great server, for sure. But as great a server as it is, it's a shitty desktop. And you'll please excuse my anger, I just got finished configuring my Linux install and promptly broke it...again.
Here's what desktop distros should be working on:
I freqently dump my virtual carts or put them on hold and come back to them later. Often, I dump a cart because, surprise surprise, I have to put in my credit card info before seeing the total to be charged. Not on my watch.
I understand many places calculate shipping in the cart because of combined shipping rates, and that's fine. A bit annoying, but fine. But asking me to commit before I know what I've committed to doesn't sit well.