Last Thursday was a holiday in my part of Germany and I used the day to upgrade my Linux Desktop and install/configure a few pieces of (not really that) new hardware.
My pretty old Desktop (AMD Duron 800 with a whopping 256 MB RAM) was running Fedora Core 3 and I decided it was time to switch to Ubuntu 7.10 because I expected to be able to use the new hardware more easily with a more recent Linux distro.
Since I wanted to keep my old /home partition I had to
fiddle with partitioning during installation. I tried to change the
size of a few partitions while I was at it and had the installer
freeze on me twice. I finally settled with removing all partitions
except for my old /home and recreating them with the
sizes I wanted them to be. Worked.
The installation itself was closer to sixty minutes rather than the 25 minutes claimed in the Ubuntu wiki, something that should have made me suspicious. The installed system works and things like Synaptic are really nice, but it feels incredibly slow. It takes about a minute or two after Login before the menus become actually usable and starting an application may take up to five minutes. I haven't tracked down the problem, yet, but the old FC3 system was running the very same applications on a GNOME desktop with much less latency (once the apps are running, things are fine). Could it be that the newer versions of GNOME require that much more power?
Three pieces of hardware wanted to be installed and configured and in neither case did things work out of the box, so I'm putting down what I did for myself to find it should I ever want to start from scratch again.
D-Link DWL-122
The first thing I wanted to use from my Desktop was an USB WLAN adapter that I received together with my DSL router three years ago. So far the Desktop was sitting in my home office in the second floor out of reach of my WLAN, so I never bothered installing it.
The Ubuntu Wiki says Ubuntu 7.10 would support the required Prism2 driver of linux-wlan-ng OOTB, well, in a sense it does.
In my case the device was detected and a network interface named
wlan0 was added, but Network Manager didn't recognize it as a wireless
interface, it reported I had two Ethernet cards in my machine.
/etc/network/interfaces didn't contain any settings for
wlan0 at all.
So I started to experiment and added a wlan0 interface to
interfaces, added a wireless_mode managed
line and restarted the network. Network Manager listed wlan0 as a
wireless network adapter and I could finally configure the rest of it
via the GUI. As a bonus I was forced to switch to a HEX WEP key since
the device wouldn't manage to connect to my network using an ASCII
key.
Epson Stylus DX 5000
I bought this printer/scanner combination and intend(ed) to use it with the help of Epson's own drivers provided via Avasys. Since my DX5000 is an all-in.one I downloaded the RPM you get when you select a Debian system (yes, an RPM for Debian) on the all-in-one download page. After that
$ sudo apt-get install alien $ sudo alien -d --script iscan*.rpm $ sudo alien -i --scripts iscan*.deb
and adding a line
SYSFS{idVendor}=="04b8", SYSFS{idProduct}=="XYZ", MODE="664", GROUP="scanner"
at the bottom of /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libsane.rules
(replacing XYZ with the product key reported by lsusb)
was all I needed to get xsane to detect the scanner and
use it.
This German article was pretty much all help I needed.
Unfortunately the all-in-one package of Avasys does not include the printer part and the printer driver download seems to be down (and has been for more than four weeks now). Does anybody know where else I might obtain the Avasys printer package for a DX5000?
So I now have a scanner-only all-in-one
Given that the printer came with a driver CD for Windows and Mac OS X I tried to install the drivers on my iBook, but unfortunately at least half of the packages were broken and failed to install. I found the drivers via Google so maybe I can report success on this front soon.
Siemens DSL 515 and Siemens Gigaset WLAN Repeater
So I now own a WLAN repeater which I bought in order to rectify the "no WLAN in the home office" situation. Like any self-respecting geek I expected to be able to install the repeater without reading any documentation, given that both the repeater and the router come with very simple HTML front-ends with little to no options to set.
Well, after half an hour of fiddling around I gave in, the router didn't want to recognize the repeater.
Again a German article came to the rescue. It turned out that I needed to upgrade the firmware of my router in order to enable repeater functionality (the firmware certainly is no longer available from Siemens Mobile, Google found it here). While I was at it, I upgraded the firmware of the repeater as well.
After that things were straight forward. Make sure that router and repeater agree on the SID and channel and other settings, that the SID is visible on both ends and that both use the same key for encryption. Once the repeater is up, go to the router configuration and make it search for repeaters (in Advanced Settings -> WLAN -> Repeater), find your repeater, check the checkbox next to it and click apply.
If you are using DHCP make sure the repeater has a static address that is outside of the DHCP range served by the router and that the DHCP ranges (if enabled in the repeater as well) don't overlap.
path: /en/personal/infra | #