mcmlxxii

In both Ubuntu Jaunty and now Karmic, I have been experiencing pretty dreadful wireless performance using a combination of the Atheros AR5008 chipset and the default GNOME connection management tool Network Manager. I have read elsewhere that Network Manager scans at regular intervals for available networks in the vicinity, which appears to have the effect of disassociating the AR5008 from the current access point, and this does indeed seem to be what is happening.

In order to test the theory, I installed WICD instead, as I have in the past, and once again WICD fixed the problem. I’m not sure why the WICD team just seem to be able to get wireless to work where Network Manager boys persistently struggle, and WICD lacks the additional functionality of 3G connection management, but it just bloody works and that’s the most important feature of a connection manager.

I’ve been using WICD on and off for some time, and I’m impressed with the speed it has developed. It also looks a lot slicker than it did in the early days, something that has not gone unnoticed in the Ubuntu camp as it’s now available in the repositories. One command,

sudo apt-get install wicd

now ditches Network Manager and installs WICD. If you’re having problems with the AR5008 in Ubuntu, it’s well worth a try.

There’s a little program available for windows that lets you turn your browser into a screensaver, looping through various web content. However, there are 2 things wrong with it. Firstly it costs money. Secondly it doesn’t run on linux.

So what? – we have bash – and after a bit of digging around this morning and combining a few bits and pieces this is my version for Ubuntu

Firstly, in order to run firefox full screen we need the AutoHide plugin, which appears to have been written by someone with an interesting sense of humour.

Secondly, a small alteration needs to be made to the  javascript prefs file (.mozilla/firefox/$profile/prefs.js, $profile = your profile). THIS MUST BE DONE WITH THE BROWSER CLOSED as Firefox overwrites the file on shutdown. Add these two lines at the end of the file:

user_pref("browser.link.open_external", 1);
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow", 1);

Now that’s done there’s just a little bash script. Feel free to hack but if you improve it please let me know! I just saved the following few lines as a file “Webscreen” in my home directory:

#!/bin/bash

remoteclient=$(find /usr/lib/ -type f -name mozilla-xremote-client | grep -m 1 xulrunner)

if [ `ps -e | grep firefox | wc -l` -eq 0 ]; then

    /usr/bin/firefox -fullscreen &
    sleep 5

fi

while [ `ps -e | grep firefox | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; do

    urls=$(cat /home/huff/Desktop/pages)

    for i in $urls
        do
        $remoteclient -a firefox "openurl($i)"

        if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
            echo "Firefox not running or ignoring me, bailing out...."
            killall firefox
            exit 0
        fi
        sleep 15
        done
done
exit 0

Note the path to the mozilla-xremote-client – this is correct on Ubuntu Jaunty but I had to use find to well, you know, find it:

find /usr/lib -iname \*mozilla-xremote\*

As can be seen the script takes the pages you want to cycle through from a text file called (I felt quite pleased with this) “pages” on the Desktop, one url on each line such as:

and scrolls through the selection every 15 seconds.

The last detail is to

chmod +x ~/Webscreen


and add a Custom Application Launcher to the panel. Thanks to mozilla for continuing the command line options started by Netscape and the cool AutoHide plugin, this was pretty easy. Hope it helps someone.

EDIT: It seems the packages needed are in Intrepid updates now, so as long as they are enabled in System > Applications > Software Sources they should be installed with a simple sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180

As a long-time (since Gutsy) follower of Ubuntu bug 99508, the one about the badly drawn window decoration (see right), I was thrilled to see that Nvidia’s 180 Beta driver fixed the problem. The driver is packaged up and available in the alpha of Jaunty’s next release, 9.04. However, running the alpha as your main OS is folly, not to mention a pain in the butt if you just want to get something done and it’s a bit broken at that moment.

One can always install nvidia’s driver from a shell using the installer provided, but I’m always happier using a .deb, and luckily the 180 debs are coming to Intrepid’s backports. Just not yet. So if you want to try the 180 driver, you can use the Jaunty .debs.

I’ve tested it on my laptop under Intrepid, with its integral Nvidia 6100 Go chipset, and it works very well. Some Jaunty testers have reported increased temperatures and odd black spots, but all is ok here. In fact I ran a full screen video on each desktop under compiz (left) without issue.
The debs are available from the Jaunty repos, and the packages required are nvidia-glx-180 and nvidia-180-kernel-source. At present, these contain the 180.11 beta driver – there is a newer one available from nvidia and no doubt the packages in the Jaunty repos will be updated shortly. Once downloaded, a few commands (i386 users will need to alter the architecture part of the filename):

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-glx-177
cd Desktop (if this is where the debs are)
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-180-kernel-source_180.11-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nvidia-glx-180_180.11-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb


And a reboot and (fingers x!) you’re done

EDIT – Please note that this post only refers to the 64 bit version of Ubuntu.

Some significant changes have been happening to the X server over the past couple of releases of Ubuntu. One of the most noticeable alterations has been the removal of the xorg.conf file from the default Ubuntu install (edit – it was removed during the development cycle but reappeared in the release version).

It is a great thing that X is now at the stage where it knows devices well enough to configure them with no user input, but occasionally a device may be incorrectly set up, or one may want to customise beyond default settings.

Such is the case with my synaptics touchpad. I really like the fact that in Linux I can configure the touchpad to trigger a middle mouse button event when it is tapped with 3 fingers. Left click – one finger, right click – two fingers, middle click – three fingers. In addition, I want to be able to disable the touchpad while typing.

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For my OU course in Web Applications Development, I have to use a piece of software called FirstClass, from OpenText. Thankfully the nice people at OpenText have packaged up a version for Debian and Ubuntu, version 8.315-2 (one major release behind Windows admittedly, but perfectly usable). If you’re using a 32 bit version the install couldn’t be easier.

However, I switched to 64bit Linux some time ago now. After emailing OpenText to see if they will be compiling a 64 bit version and receiving a positive negative, I’ve discovered a quick and simple way to get it working without leaving a mess of libraries.

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As we all know Amarok is the best music player in the world, and it’s free. It’s only available on Linux at the moment but the devs are working hard to port it to Windows. Anyway I digress. I wanted to explain how I got Amarok playing on my laptop, accessing my music collection on my media server, through my bluetooth dongle, picked up by my Sony MBR-100 bluetooth audio receiver and finally terminating joyfully in my trusty Sennheisers.

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If you’ve used the Ralink RT73 chipset under Ubuntu for any length of time, you’ll know that the default drivers aren’t yet perfect (some supporting evidence). Some may have had more success, but in my experience they drop out regularly and transfer rates are pretty mediocre. The modules used are the rt2x00usb and rt73usb. These are the next generation of Ralink drivers from Serialmonkey, and to be fair they have improved a great deal over the past couple of years. However, there is a more stable driver, which, although requiring some sacrifice, rewards the user with good injection support, great transfer speeds and no drop-outs.

Step forward the rt73 legacy driver….
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