Day 13
the 1GB of Corsair ram arrived today so I pulled one 128mb stick out of the laptop and inserted the 1gb module, and then booted back into PCLinuxOS, what a difference in speed the extra ram makes (swap is not being used any more, before it was chewing away at it and the hard disc was chugging away)
so for any of you out there with sluggish systems, consider upgrading your RAM before anything else, 1GB of ram today is not that expensive
Quote:[anyweb@np0013722cba3d ~]$ free total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1156444 366960 789484 0 10740 156724
-/+ buffers/cache: 199496 956948
Swap: 4088500 0 4088500
I guess what this also highlights is that a modern day distro like PCLinuxOS does want more ram especially if you are using KDE or Gnome as the desktop manager, 256mb of ram just doesn't cut it any more.
update on the kernel panic issue i mentioned on week one
Today I read that the bbc.co.uk/news problem (causing my smoothwall to reboot) is indeed a [url=]known problem with smoothwall 3[/url], and nothing at all to do with PCLinuxOS, well I'm glad that is cleared up, still weird though
Compiz and Compiz Fusion
On this old laptop (ICH4 integrated intel video), I just cannot get Compiz or Compiz Fusion to work properly, well I can enable it but once I restart KDE or Gnome and login again, every window is missing the border so I cannot move them, resize them or do normal things..
look at this screenshot with Compiz enabled
<a class="ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image" href="<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1201097594.png" data-fileid="1025">[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_01_2008/post-1-1201097594.png[/img]</a>
I will test this some more to see if I can resolve this problem.
Wireless
One of the biggest pains with Linux is usually (particularly on laptops) wireless, and this Laptop is no exception with a Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03) wireless card. I started the
Configure your Computer - Administrator center applet, and chose Network & Inernet. Next I selected (or rather tried to)
Wireless Connection and it claimed 'no device found', however the results from lspci show the card
Quote:02:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03)
and a bit of googling suggest it needs ndiswrapper, so I start up synaptic and search for the ndiswrapper package, doing that reveals that it is already installed, however the Broadcom Wireless Adapter bcmwl5a is not installed, so I select to install that (as it's required for this wireless card). After applying the changes I can see that ndiswrapper has now loaded the bcmwl5a driver via ndiswrapper -l
before adding Ndiswrapper support files for the Broadcom Wireless Adapter bcmwl5a we see:-
Quote:[root@np0013722cba3d ~]# ndiswrapper -l
after applying the changes in Synpatic we see:-
Quote:[root@np0013722cba3d ~]# ndiswrapper -lbcmwl5a : driver installed
Ok I go back to the
Configure your Computer - Administrator center applet and this time choose Setup a
new network interface.. option from within the Network & Internet choices. A wizard starts, I select wireless from the list of options then I click next, I'm prompted to use a windows driver with ndiswrapper, and I click next. A drakconnect window pops up with the default choice of 'use the ndiswrapper driver bcmwl5a' i accept it and click next. At this point an error window pops up telling me i need firmware for the card in order to continue and it points me to
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/media...x.php/List
i had a quick look there but couldn't find the firmware... so I figured that the firmware is part of the driver, I downloaded the windows driver for my card
from here, and then extracted the drivers/files from within there using wine (if wine isn't installed then as root do
apt-get install wine -y). Once done I re ran the Setup a new network interface wizard' except this time I click on browse for the driver and point it to the directory holding the bcmwl5a.inf and bcmwl5.inf files. Once done the wizard continues on and prompts me for the usual wireless questions (essid/wep key etc), and now it looks like i'm nearly done
iwconfig reports this
Quote:wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:48 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
which is nice except not associated. and ifconfig reports no ip...... its like it just ignored the settings i typed into the wizard so i'll try to manually add the info.
Code:
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed essid wireloss key 62616d7365
this worked ! now I was online with wireless in PCLinuxOS.