Tag Archives: Tech

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Fedora Linux (fc8) on my new laptop… the wireless saga

I love it when a plan comes together but hate it when I can’t think of a catchy title for a post. Oh well. In my last post regarding my new laptop, things have been progressing.

My last statement in that post said something about how there is something to be said about having a Mac “just work out of the box” but I’ve seen lots of people post saying that part of the fun of Linux, is trying to get things to work. It can be downright frustrating, of course, but when it works, it works well.

My laptop is a Toshiba A215 (which I just added another 2GB of ram). It’s a great laptop. Vista works well with it. I can’t complain about that, but I’ve been wanting to run Linux full time on it. One of the quirks of this laptop is that the wireless device shows up as an usb device, which is something very strange:

[jpabian@stoshua]~% lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

This wireless device is indeed a Realtek RTL8187B. Some people have gotten it to work and others have just given up on it. Those of the people who got it to work have hardcoded the wifi settings in a config file. I wanted to have the nifty wifi-selector that “NetworkManager” provides. I don’t want to hardcode anything (like the Mac). I searched and searched and tried everything I could find to do. I found a lot of really great resources but nothing worked. This was one of the best sites:

  • Realtek Linux wireless driver project

I mean it, I was pulling my hair out. It shouldn’t be this hard. I began to be disappointed with my otherwise ideal laptop. I started to read about other wireless USB devices that work with linux. I came up with a plan. I checked out Circuit City’s, Best Buy’s, and Office Depot’s websites to see what they had on sale AND what wireless USB devices worked under linux.

One page I had found (and you know, I can’t find it now!), had a list of pretty much all the wireless USB devices and if they had kernel support or if drivers existed. But it also had a column that reported if it “worked out of the box” or not. Each of the stores I mentioned above had a Linksys on sale, AND it was reported to “work out of the box!” I was excited but also very nervous whether or not it would work. I saw a few posts around where people where having problems with. I picked up the Linksys® WUSB54GC Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter for $50 after “instant savings.”

wusb54gc.jpg

So when the moment of truth came, I plugged in the WUSB54GC into one of my USB ports and say the following message:

Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> wlan1: Device is fully-supported using driver ‘rt73usb’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> (wlan1): exporting device as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Device/4
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Now managing wireless (802.11) device ‘wlan1’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Bringing up device wlan1

It worked! I didn’t have to do anything! Sure enough, NetworkManager presented me with both my wireless networks (and my neighbors’). I couldn’t believe it. It works great. It works good on the suspend and resume functions of my laptop.

Sure, I really wish that the onboard wifi worked under Linux, but from I’ve read, they’ve only just merged the driver support into the very latest kernel sources so I suspect that support will continue to get better. But for now, I’m very happy with this device.

Now, the only lingering item is sound. Fedora 8 went to using Pulse Audio for the default sound server. Sure looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work and I’m not the only one; there are several threads over at the Fedora Forums talking about it. But FC8 is still bleeding edge. It will work sooner than later, I’m sure.

I’ll save that for another post.

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Linux, Vista, and my new laptop

OH YEAH! (He says like the Kool-aid pitcher as he smashes through the wall!)

My new laptop finally came yesterday.  We missed FedEx on Tuesday and I waiting all day for them to come back yesterday.  I got a Toshiba with a dual core AMD 64 Athalon X2; it was a Thanksgiving day purchase (an early Black Friday deal that I happened to catch in time).  It’s a beaut and came with Vista Home Premium on it.

If I had my druthers, I would have told them to hold the OS; as I was going to install Fedora Linux on it as soon as I could.  I burned my x86_64 DVD with anticipation of its arrival.

It came right at 1PM.  By 2PM I was booting off the Fedora DVD and getting ready to install.  I knew on the Ubuntu LiveCD, it has Gparted on it, so I assumed this would to.  It did not.  A quick websearch recommended using a virtual term to use ntfsresize and fdisk.  I was too impatient and found the Gparted LiveCD and thought I’d use that.  The drive was 160G so I thought 40G for Fedora and 120G for Vista since I could always mount the NTFS partition in Linux.  I quickly downloaded and burned the image to disk.
Well, as luck would have it (or my impatience) the README on the LiveCD had something like this to say:

 You can’t use Gparted to resize Vista partitions.  You have to use nftresize and fdisk

It gave some basic examples and I followed them and it looked like it worked.  I rebooted and got the message that “No OS found” and the laptop tried to do a network boot.  So I began to install Fedora.

During the installation, I realized that I forgot to set the Vista partion to active/bootable.  I used fdisk to fix that and after the installation, I had a flawless dual-boot system.

It seemed like the install took forever.  My previous Fedora installations had been from CD not DVD so there was a lot more stuff installed locally.  After the install, I had something like 77 updates to download and apply.  That did take a long time.  I couldn’t install the other stuff while the package manager was running so I watch Mythbusters and chatted via Pidgin.

I  wasn’t getting any action from my wireless.  I was using ethernet cable.  Turns out, that Toshiba used a Realtek wireless card that shows up as an USB device.  WTF?  It’s a Realtek RTL8187B.

Poking around in the forums it seems some ingenious guy got the source for the driver and patched it for Linux, or Ubuntu specifically.  It seems to work, as it shows up as wlan0 and I can manually assign an IP to it, but wpa_supplicant doesn’t see it.  Honestly, I ran out of time to tinker with it, but I think I am about 95% of the way there.

I also installed the fglrx drivers for the ATI x1200 card.  This also works great and I got my tiny resolution I’ve been craving.  I now have a nice wide, large workspace.  I plan on getting about 1GB or 2GB of RAM; I’ll just wait until it is on sale.

So, here’s the links I found useful:

I’ll follow up if and when I get my wireless working.  I am pretty confident I’ll get it.  I also received a suggestion via the Skribit widget to do a post about Mac vs. Linux.  That’s a good idea.  There is something to be said about having everything “work out of the box” but I don’t mind the tinkering.

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tmobile wing with a new modded ROM

It was hard to come up with a flashy title for this post, but I figured that I get a lot of traffic from people looking for info on the Wing.

As it stands, ActiveSync stopped working some time this week. I installed some apps and thought that one of them could be the culprit, but searching the forums and Googling clues proved to be fruitless. In the end, I resorted to a hard reset (since at this point, it was really important I sync’ed my contacts) and ActiveSync worked just fine.

So, I headed over to Howard Forums to see what the latest was. Actually, I couldn’t remember how to do a hard reset, (couldn’t remember which button to push) and stumbled into the slipperly slope of installing a modded ROM.

First, if you have a Tmobile Wing, you need to read this thread as it is a treasure trove of tips, tricks, and improvements:

On my Wing, I’ve been using the HTC Touch skins on my phone. I really like the improved look and launcher of the phone, but by doing a hard reset (like I had to do to sync again), I need to reinstall all my mods. This isn’t my screen capture but it looks like this:

 

I liked the look so much better. Then tonight I stumbled upon this link and it was a breeze following the directions:

  • Newbs guide to Herald modification *updated* 11/02/07

For those of you guys that don’t know, HTC Herald is the same as the Wing. That thread has a ton of great info in there for you to check out. If you are new to the Wing or wanted to learn more about hacking it, then you need to READ IT COMPLETELY before attempting anything found therein.

Again, this isn’t my screen shot but my Wing now looks like this. I love it:

 

There is a fair amount of customization you have to do, but it isn’t too bad or hard.  I was again able to resync all my data and contacts so it’s good to go, but still have some minor tweaks.

Make sure you check out Part 2 of the FAQ.

 

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mspscan.exe crashes… or ScanSrv crashes

This is totally nuts.  As you might have read, I reinstalled WinXP on a newly formated hard drive and had to reinstall Office 2003 naturally.  When I tried to scan in a doc with Microsoft Document Scanning, as soon as I hit the “scan” button, the application crashed and wanted to phone home to Microsoft and report the error. Here’s what showed up in my Event Viewer -> Application:

Faulting application mspscan.exe, version 11.0.8166.2, stamp 4616c200, faulting module mspscan.exe, version 11.0.8166.2, stamp 4616c200, debug? 0, fault address 0x00008b66.

I couldn’t find anything on Google or Google groups… nothing even close.  I did find two articles in Spanish that didn’t seem to help.   I was starting to sweat since I really needed to send a particular fax, (I use a web-based faxing service so I scan in my docs and then email them to the fax provider who sends them as a fax to my recipient).

I then searched for “microsoft document scanning crashes” and I found something that looked like a clue from somewhere:

To get this to work on our machines using ‘Microsoft Office Document
Scanning‘, we went into ‘My Computer’ from the desktop and under
‘Scanners and Cameras’ shortened the scanner’s filename to 26
characters.  Also put the recent file history settings that were
deleted previously from the registry back in place (couple of them had
really long filenames). It still works.  For us it appears the
presence of recent file history with long filenames had nothing to do
with the ‘…Document Scanning‘ not working.

You know what? It worked.  Instead of going to “My Computer” I went into “Control Panel” and changed:

  • Hewlitt-Packard OfficeJet K80 Scanner

to:

  • HP OfficeJet K80 Scanner

And it worked.  So, here I post this for you in case you need it.    This is apparently something that came up after Office SP3.  Good luck!

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i gave circuit city another chance…

I rarely shop at the big box stores. I even rarely bite on something on sale at a big box store. When I was in college, I opened a Best Buy store when they came to Atlanta. To make a long story short, I felt like I sold my soul to the devil. Since I had worked there, it has been very hard to bring myself to shop there. I know how the employees were treated and I knew the story of the people I worked with. To put it in simple terms, Best Buy wasn’t for me. I wasn’t into selling something someone didn’t need or selling extended warranties, (yeah, they’re a waste of money: pure profit). I don’t want to get into that since that’s not the point of my post. My point is that I understand somewhat the mentality of the retail sales person having been there myself.

As I said, I rarely shop at the big box stores. But my wife has been saying she would really like a laptop. I tried to hook her up with a 1Ghz Ubuntu Dell laptop and it was okay for email, but just a hair beyond her tech level. She wanted Microsoft. Okay, I thought. Now, tomorrow is our 10th anniversary.

I scoured the hot deal websites and found a nice $399 laptop at Circuit City after rebates. This wasn’t a monster laptop but it would be excellent for what she wanted to do; email, surfing, editing, etc. Any real heavy lifting would be done by our home-built XP desktop so this would really just be a satelite.

So I checked online for instore stock and made a special trip to a Circuit City that still had the laptop I wanted in stock. I found it on display and took it for a test drive. I don’t know anything about Vista but I know enough to tell if the laptop would be fine. I thought it was a good deal.

I waved down some slack-jawed EMO kid and told him I wanted a laptop. When I showed him the one I wanted, he went, “Oh…” and then the conversation went like this… (btw… he was identified as a supervisor on his name tag).

EMO: “Oh, so you want this one. What are you going to do with it?”

Me: “Surfing, email… that sort of thing.”

EMO: “Are you planning on upgrading it?”

Me: “Yeah, probably.”

EMO: “Oh, well you can do that. 512MB of ram is barely enough to do anything. In fact, 2GB is barely enough to do anything on this laptop.”

Me: “Yeah? I think it will be okay for what I am planning on doing with it.”

EMO: “Yeah, well.. the processor isn’t fast enough to run Vista.”

Me: “I’m sure it will be fine.”

EMO: “Okay, here’s the details on the return policy… blah blah blah and being slow isn’t a reason to return it.”

Me: “I am willing to accept the risk.”

I was so mad at this little punk. Obviously, he doesn’t know me from Adam, but I think I do know a little about computers. Clearly, he was trying to up-sell me into something else. Thankfully, he didn’t bother asking me about the extended warranty because I would have walked out. I was fuming.

So I paid for it and picked it up. Everyone else at the store was really nice. As I left the parking lot, I began doubting my purchase. Maybe it wasn’t good enough…or I should have gotten more bang for my buck. Then I realized that was this kids job… to cast doubt into someone’s decision to purchase something. When I made that realization, I felt like I had been violated. I swear, I was 10 seconds away from walking out of that store and have them loseWeight Exercise my sale because of this kid. I would have but that was the only store within my area that still had the laptop in stock.

What would have happened if this kid tried to talk to me and told me why he liked another laptop (similarly priced)? He could have opened with, “Yeah that is a good deal on that laptop, but maybe you should consider one of these because…” instead of trying to scare me. Like I said, I felt violated and doubted myself. Maybe I was more mad at myself for letting him get to me.

As a gut-check, I stopped at an Office Depot to see what they had on sale. I still maintain I got a good deal at Circuit City and I am sure it will be great for my wife. I might upgrade the RAM but I’ll wait for a deal on that.

The point of my post is that, no wonder people are afraid of computers and technology because you got chowder-heads at these stores trying to scare people to spend more money. Having been a Best Buy employee many years ago, I am familiar with the sales tactic of F.U.D. and I hate myself for almost falling for it. Grrrr!

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a kiss of death for Mio?

Notice, I said “a kiss of death,” not “the kiss of death.”

Mio really screwed up. They made enemies for life.

If you’ve been coming here to learn about my Mio c310x and hacking it, you’ve probably either seen here or on some of the forums that Mio has been promising a map update for some time. First Mio said it would be Q1, then spring, then June, then July.

People were speculating the updates should be free or minimal in cost. Other’s said, “Hey, you got a great GPS unit for ~$150 – $200; why would you expect an update for free?” Either way, they release the map update on July 16th, I think. You had two options to get the update:

  • Find a copy at your local Circuit City for $14.95 + tax
  • Buy directly from Mio for $14.95 + $9.95 shipping and handling.

Both options are reasonable. But I’m a cheap sonuvabitch and would have gladly waited until I could find a copy locally. Many people, however, gladly ordered directly from Mio and paid the $9.95 shipping and handling fee.

Then, everything starts going downhill.

If you view the last 20 pages or so from this thread you can see what happened and continues to happen:

This reads a lesson in “How to turn off customers for life.” I’ll save you from reading the entire thread and give you the highlights:

  • Order page had many problems:
    • couldn’t handle the initial load
    • one of the domain names referred to in the “order confirmation” letter hadn’t even been registered yet; people were worried they were being phished.
    • emails to Mio bounced, again inflaming security concerns
  • Customer service is giving conflicting answers (if you can get through). Many reported getting busy signals when trying to call in, (seriously what company gives busies in this day and age?).
  • Of those folks that ordered early most got their order after four weeks, many still haven’t gotten it despite paying almost $10 for shipping.
  • Email inquiries go unanswered.

There were some people who had reported problems with the actual upgrade, but you are always going to have some hardware issues. And thankfully these people that have had problems are getting more help from the forums than the actual company.

Most people are pissed off since they feel like they paid a premium for shipping at a steep $10 when USPS Priority mail is around $4 and would have been delivered in three days. However, Mio in its wisdom shipping these DVD’s via Media Mail (from USPS):

Media Mail® service is a cost efficient way to mail books, sound recordings, recorded video tapes, printed music, and recorded computer-readable media (such as CDs, DVDs, and diskettes). Media Mail can not contain advertising except for incidental announcements of books. The maximum Lose Weight Exercise for Media Mail is 70 lbs.

The USPS website doesn’t say how long shipping something Media Mail will take. But I will say I have had books shipped this method. It’s really, really, cheap and the book took about three weeks coming from California. So the perception from the customer is “Hey, I spent $10 extra to receive my update, yet Mio sent it the cheapest, longest way possible.”

In my line of work, I’ve learned long ago that honesty is the best policy when dealing with customers. So when people call into Mio to get an update, cancel their order (since they can get it at Circuit City now), they get the run around, different answers depending on whom they talk to. They feel like they are being lied to.

The problem with the website flaking out lends the impression that Mio just doesn’t have their act together.

Now, I think the old saying, “You can have it cheap, good, or fast but not all three” is applicable here. At least the update is cheap, but it certainly wasn’t fast and seeing how Mio is treating the customers over this, I wouldn’t say it was good, either.

I can see how something like this happened. Someone there thought all of this sounded good to ship the DVD’s via Media Mail, saying the company money but not realizing how long it would take to get them in peoples hands. The customer service reps are more or less left holding the bag and are having to deal with angry customers and they might be trying to do their best in trying to appease them, but it isn’t a coordinated effort and not all the reps are telling the same story. So you got angry customers, public forums on the Internet, folks screaming to the BBB and it begins to all slide downhill.

One time, something similar happened at work. There was a major mailing that was going out to a specific group of customers. It was some software and manuals. The list of contcts was in an Excel spreadsheet and was >5,000. The spreadsheet had columns for name, house number, street, city, state, zip, etc., Someone tried to sort the column for house number, but DID NOT expand the sort to include the street name. So the house numbers got sorts but not the street name so ALL the addresses got horribly borked. The mailing went out USPS Priority and ALL came back. There were mail bins upon mail bins of return packages. And these were printed materials with a custom letter for each recipient. It all had to be redone. What a mess. That’s the sort of mistake you never make twice, (unless you are truly a dumbass), and since I just heard about it, I am always careful when I sort my spreadsheets.

So, what does this mean for Mio? Because they haven’t come out and addressed or even acknowledged the customers’ frustration, they’ve made enemies for life. Or at least people who will never ever buy another Mio product again. I can’t say I blame them. Mio has some really slick GPS products but people would rather buy from a company that they feel like supports them. They had a golden opportunity to turn these customers into die-hard fans. The promise was good; a reasonably priced upgrade and everyone was willing to pay for it. They were even excited about it and were willing to forget about the long delays. Now they feel like they’ve been kicked in the teeth and some of those folks that were willing to pay for a legitimate upgrade will upgrade their units by “other means” without paying for it. They’ll be force underground.

What Mio should have done? They should have came out and said they made a mistake. They should have refunded everyone who paid the extra money for shipping or at least offered to credit anyone who called in. The call center reps should have been prepared with an official statement from the management saying yeah, they made a mistake and for your trouble we’ll refund your shipping costs. They should stop sending upgrade DVD’s via bulk Media Mail and either send it via normal or Priority USPS.

Something similar happened with TigerDirect a while ago. Tiger Direct did some sneaking things with customers long ago; if you ordered from them they also signed you for some long distance promotion, people have had problems with their rebates, etc. Personally, I have never ordered from them. But if you visit any of the “hot deal” forums, people are quick to turn away whenever a deal comes up from TigerDirect. They still have a damaged image from something that happened years ago. Based on their history and their perception, some people choose to stay away, even if it is a legitimate hot deal. I’m included in that boat. I simply choose not to do business with them.   I don’t have a particular axe to grind with TD, by the way.

  • Tiger Direct Sucks.org
  • RipOff Alert I
  • RipOff Alert II

Is this the fate of Mio? Potentially. I think they have a chance to pull it out, but that window of opportunity is getting smaller as time goes on. Will I still do business with Mio? Yeah, I probably would. I believe in their technology and being in an industry that deals with customers myself, I can sort of understand what happened. I hope they do what is right.

This really won’t kill the company as I said they have great products.  But they blew a chance to develop die hard fanatics who would always talk up their products and claim to be loyal customers.

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Barcamp… Atlanta

Man, only once in a while do I get lucky enough to find out about something very cool ahead of time.  And, it doesn’t hurt to know people.  Check this out:

 Save the date: October 12th and 13th, 2007

Location: Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Tech Square in Midtown Atlanta

Check back soon for more information and details.

And:

What? You don’t know what BarCamp is?  ‘s okay.  Here’s the Wikipedia page for it:

I’ve never been to anything like this before but I am really excited that I might get to go, (limited number of signups).

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Babe, I’m on fire…

The horse says it, the pig says it
The judge in his wig says it

Man, I don’t know what is going on but so many electical things have been breaking.. and I mean breaking in a big, bad hard way. Here’s a few things:

  • A/V Receiver
  • Roku Soundbridge
  • My Powerbook, sniff sniff sniff
  • Harmony Remote (taken apart, cleaned, and repaired!)
  • Sun Shade on our deck
  • check engine light in the car
  • BSOD’s on our PC (think that might be fixed, I got good at debugging core dumps in WinXP)
  • My Trixbox server had three kernel panics

And this is all within a couple of weeks.

The fox and the rabbit
And the nun in her habit says

I am pretty bummed that my Roku M500 is dead. I took it apart and see that if I can get a new part I probably good fix it. The question is, will I be able to buy just the part or do I have to shell out for a new complete one? I love this thing as it has profoundly changed me and my families life.

I am even more bummed about my Powerbook. It is unlikely I will get a new one from work and more likely I’ll get a Windows laptop. It isn’t that I have anything really against a Windows laptop, but I do love my Mac a lot. Maybe it can be repaired…

My mate Bill Gates says it
The President of the United States says it
The slacker and the worker
The girl in her burqa says

I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails lately. So far, I love it. My first project will be to do a UI for the Linux webcam software Motion. How did I get so far without knowing more about Ruby!?!?! This will be something you, the casual reader won’t ever see as it is intended for family and friends.

The general with his tank says it
The man at the bank says it
The soldier with his rocket
And the mouse in my pocket says

I am still loving my T-Mobile Wing. I have installed many apps, but the one I spend the most time with is Chess Genius. I might actually register it. No one ever IM’s me on it. sniff

The drug-addled wreck
With a needle in his neck says it
The drunk says it, punk says it
The brave Buddhist monk says

My brother-in-law has gotten a Nintendo Wii. What a neat thing! I want one! One an unrelated note, I’ve been learning quite a bit about Ethernet cameras; wired and wireless. I foresee some in my future.

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hoo-boy

It’s been a while since I last updated.  I was in Pasadena last week for an offsite.  It was great.  Sometimes I get the heebee-jeebies at my current job but then I spend time with some of these folks and I get all jazzed about things.   So traveling took some time out from me keeping up with the updates and I feel like I should post a minor update… even if it seems a little disjunct.

While in Pasadena, I presented on VoD and IPTV. I didn’t present on the technology behind it, (leave it to the NetEng guys…) but rather the market and the analysts’ predictions.   It was well received and I enjoyed doing the research on it.

Sunday morning, our audio receiver finally died.   Today I placed an order for a new replacement.  I can’t wait for it to get here! It will be a world of difference!  Thanks to the members over at AVSForum.

I’ve been doing some cool stuff with the Webcam/Linux/Motion set up.  I got in trouble with my wife so I pulled it all down.   In the meantime, I am learning Ruby on Rails to make it better.

I’m also spending a lot more time with Subversion for personal docs and projects, since my webhost gives me a ton of space.  I’m debating if I should just punch holes in my firewall or use my webhost for svn storage.  The jury is still out.

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Linux Webcams

Oh boy! I’m using the Safari beta on WinXP tonight. I have to say, that I was getting tired of Firefox slowing down my Powerbook that I decided to try Safari. So far, so good. I liked it so much, I am trying the Safari beta at home. So, I’ve been busy. Things have been good and I feel like I’ve been flexing my mental muscle. I’ve been spending my last few nights trying to get webcams working under Linux. I have a cheap-o webcam and was trying to help someone set up a situation where their family from overseas can “check in” on them from time to time.Again, as in most of my projects, I don’t want to pay for software and I want to remain legit. For WinXP, I found this site to be really useful:

(ah, a bug with safari… mental note and switching back to FireFox).

This was an incredibly useful site. I found this software linked from it:

I was really impressed with YawCam. It did everything I could imagine and then some.

  • live stream
  • password protected (various users)
  • scheduling
  • logging
  • tweaks

If you are running Windows, I’d recommend using that. It was really great. But, I wanted to take it further. I have an old Dell Laptop running Ubuntu. I’ll write a much more comprehensive post later about all the different options I found, but in the meantime, I have come to love Motion:

Motion For Linux

I ended up building it from source, (which was a pain in the ass getting all the right dpkg’s installed). But it is slick. Ken is my new hero:

  • Kenneth Lavrsen’s Web Cameras

The tar.gz Ken distributes has config files that are outdated. It took me a little while to figure that out, but if you read the wiki, then you should be able to figure it out. Maybe I’ll release my configs.