In summary,
1. Use Synaptic to get ndiswrapper-tools
2. Get the windows drivers, and copy the .sys and .inf to somewhere (say /home//Linksys/)
3. Open terminal, and enter the following commands:
3a. cd Linksys
3b. sudo ndiswrapper -i.inf (mine was lsb something, but I just renamed it to linksys.inf as it makes it easier). The screen should show something about Forcing parameter RadioState|0 to RadioState|1... mine had 4 lines.
3c. cd /etc/ndiswrapper/
3d. Edit all the .conf files, look for the line RadioState|1 and change it to RadioState|0 (to do this, I had to type sudo gedit and open the files from the GUI... gedit didn't quite like opening files with \: from the command line, not sure why) I'm not sure if just changing one or two files will work, but I just changed all 4.
3e. sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
3f. (optional) sudo echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules
3g. sudo iwlist wlan0 scan (look for your access point in the list)
3h. sudo iwconfig wlan0 channelessid mode Managed (the X and ESSID should come from the iwlist)
3i. sudo ifup wlan0
I've realized that I get too much sex on too regular a basis to put up with *nix. F* *nix.
And lest you think I'm exagerating, here are the actual instructions I'm talking about:
"4. Unstrap the wizzywig using chicken bones and voodoo magic." and "7. Make sure you set the configuration files to the square root of your mother's dog's birthday."I seriously doubt that any *nix-guy said that .
You try and describe in writing how to shut down a XP-machine ...
How many steps was that ??
I seriously doubt that any *nix-guy said that .
You try and describe in writing how to shut down a XP-machine ...
How many steps was that ??
So, my wife comes home with a Ubuntu 10 CD and says, "My professor gave me this. It sounds like something you might like." I had an old lappy laying around with a dead hard drive, so I scavenged the 7Gb drive out of a another deceased lappy (a ThinkPad 600E) and set it up.
...
So far, so good...
Then I try to get some action out of an old Linksys wifi card (this machine doesn't have built-in wifi)
....
So, he does, saying, "This was easy. Just follow these instructions:" and then he posts a process with a dozen f*ing steps! Among the steps are cryptic things like "4. Unstrap the wizzywig using chicken bones and voodoo magic." and "7. Make sure you set the configuration files to the square root of your mother's dog's birthday." What the f*ing f*?!
...
Anyone want a lightly used Ubuntu disc? Cheap!
Could you please post a link to these instructions?
F*cking *Nix DOES work .. It also requires that you at least have a vague idea of what the F*ck you are doing .
And yes, linux is not an operating system for the average person. Not yet anyway.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=5645
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=186538
I've been doing this computer stuff for a long time. Like, 30 years. I was hand building boxes from random collections of parts in the 80s. I've punched chips into memory cards, rearranged driver load orders in CONFIG.SYS, used Borland Sidekick V1.2 and spent hours messing with CEMM 386 in order to squeeze a couple extra K of RAM into DOS so that "X-Wing vs. TIE" would run properly.
But, I'm not that young or patient any more and computers are a means to an end, not the end itself. I just want **** to work.
Now, I am using an older wifi card in an older laptop, so I might have more success if I spend a few ducats on something newer. I know I can pull down USB wifi adapter for cheap. But I also know that if I install any version of Win on this machine, I'll be able to find and install drivers for it in a few minutes with a couple clicks of a mouse.
Some adapters are supported by a kludge called "Ndiswrapper" which is a Rube Goldbergian widget that uses duct tape and voodoo to make a Windows driver work under Linux. I tried this once. Bad experience. Do not attempt. Those ridiculous instructions are for Ndiswrapper.
This. I played around with stuff as a kid, but I like girls and have a real job, so I just want **** to work when I need it. Spending hours tweaking **** that should work out of the box is no longer fun to me.
5. Click on 'Advanced'
Linus Torvalds now lives in the US.
Cold winters and Linux are best suited for college students with lots of free time and a weird view of lulz.
Note that if a driver isn't installed "automagically" in Ubuntu...more likely then not, it is because the vendor never provided a driver for linux (or one was not reverse-engineered). The fact that you can STILL use this unsupported (by the vendor) hardware with the Windows driver, using the ndiswrapper [1] software is amazing IMHO. I have always been impressed by that project.
When it gets rough, you always end up on the command line. Distributions like Ubuntu put a pretty cake on top of it and most of the time, the cake does work very well. But this doesn't do a very good job of preparing you for when stuff breaks. If you just want everything to work, some of the desktop Linuxes can (almost) get you there. It's not on par with a Win XP with hardware from the XP era, or a Win 7 with modern hardware still, but I consider mucking around the Registry to be not any less obscure than copypasting a few lines into the console or into a text file. Familiarity plays into this too, I feel.
If maintaining an OS and tweaking it is fun to you, then Linux will be fun to you. If it just has to work, you're better off with Windows.
It's not true at all that you have to keep on tinkering.
.
I have heard that line so many times that I have to laugh. I get the impression some people think that a linux OS never works right and needs constant care to keep running.
If that was true I would have abandoned it a long time ago.
Yes, there are certainly times when something goes wrong with Linux systems, and sometimes the best, or only, way to resolve the issue is to go to a command prompt and do some Unix type stuff.
In my experience, most, certainly not all, Windows folks are uncomfortable using a command line and it only takes one visit there to sour the experience for them. Unix commands are very powerful but not everyone appreciates that enough to tolerate and learn what to them is a foreign environment. My opinion anyway based on personal experience and folks I know.
Right, but normal day to day activity doesn't require much. Outside of using apt-get or synaptic to upgrade the packages, there isn't much of reason for a regular user to have to play 'mechanic'.
It does get interesting when something goes wrong, but that wouldn't be something that is OS specific.
Not everyone can repair the car that they drive. But they know how to drive it though.
It does get interesting when something goes wrong, but that wouldn't be something that is OS specific.
Not everyone can repair the car that they drive. But they know how to drive it though.
F*ing Broadcom.
The irritating thing about Linux is there isn't a big "revert to the previous" button (I'm being deliberately vague). Take upgrades for example. It would be relatively easy *IF* the people putting together distributions insisted on using LVM when installing to be able to quickly revert to a snapshot (lvm snapshots), so you can try an upgrade and revert if it goes wrong. Basically you preserve a pre-upgrade boot environment (to borrow a term from Solaris) that you can switch back to.
Back when I was still using a Sun Ultra40 as my main workstation, I was doing something approximating to this through several upgrades. Of course it was a very hackish solution, but I'm happy at the command-line.
The irritating thing about Linux is there isn't a big "revert to the previous" button (I'm being deliberately vague). Take upgrades for example. It would be relatively easy *IF* the people putting together distributions insisted on using LVM when installing to be able to quickly revert to a snapshot (lvm snapshots), so you can try an upgrade and revert if it goes wrong. Basically you preserve a pre-upgrade boot environment (to borrow a term from Solaris) that you can switch back to.Windows has restore points of course which primarily works on the registry which Linux doesn't have.
Back when I was still using a Sun Ultra40 as my main workstation, I was doing something approximating to this through several upgrades. Of course it was a very hackish solution, but I'm happy at the command-line.
In my experience, most, certainly not all, Windows folks are uncomfortable using a command line and it only takes one visit there to sour the experience for them. Unix commands are very powerful but not everyone appreciates that enough to tolerate and learn what to them is a foreign environment. My opinion anyway based on personal experience and folks I know.I used to be the same, but I've learned to love it now. I used to hate it 'cause I just didn't know many of the tools. That's slowly changing and now I pretty much never want to leave the command-line. It gives you far more control.
Acquitted for being like everybody other CEO in Silicon Valley. Orgies and Drugs.
Windows Restore has the funny habit of rolling back previous problems, there's been a small handful of times where Windows Restore has fixed a problem for me, but in most cases it has no effect.I would agree with this based on my experience, although a couple of times it really came through on systems belonging to others who I was trying to fix for them.
That said, updates killing Linux are far more common than updates killing Windows due to the abundant use of shared libraries in Linux. Ironically, I find this problem is best avoided by using distros like Arch that keep everything up to date, as opposed to using something like Debian or Ubuntu which has lots of out of date software which breaks if you need to have the latest version of something or other...My experience with Ubuntu differs. So far the only issue I had was when I ran out of disk space during an update which was my fault as Ubuntu had warned me of this impending doom MANY times. Other than that, I apply updates recommended by update manager at least every 3 days, often every day, for well over a year now, with no issues other than the corruption due to running out of disk space.
Windows Restore has the funny habit of rolling back previous problems, there's been a small handful of times where Windows Restore has fixed a problem for me, but in most cases it has no effect.
That said, updates killing Linux are far more common than updates killing Windows due to the abundant use of shared libraries in Linux. Ironically, I find this problem is best avoided by using distros like Arch that keep everything up to date, as opposed to using something like Debian or Ubuntu which has lots of out of date software which breaks if you need to have the latest version of something or other...
Windows Restore has the funny habit of rolling back previous problems, there's been a small handful of times where Windows Restore has fixed a problem for me, but in most cases it has no effect.
That said, updates killing Linux are far more common than updates killing Windows due to the abundant use of shared libraries in Linux. Ironically, I find this problem is best avoided by using distros like Arch that keep everything up to date, as opposed to using something like Debian or Ubuntu which has lots of out of date software which breaks if you need to have the latest version of something or other...
Ubuntu gets away from these problems by targeting itself as a desktop OS for novice to intermediate skilled Linux users. If you stick to the 'rails' and only use software in the official repos, and general don't poke around with it, you should be safe (at least in most cases anyway)I do try to install from the official repos to try & avoid problems.
With Debian on the other hand, I've seen too many Debian servers fail when someone needs the latest version of some software installed and the installation/upgrade kills the system. I think the problem here however is that you have a system that in some ways is so badly designed and obsolete that it encourages its target market to break it in order to make it work.
That's before we get onto the other problems with Debians, including the fact that it's run by freetard imbeciles. But that's a rant for another night.
I disagree completely. Both are good, but it depends on your needs. If you need a system that you can control completely, and I don't mean that in an obsessive, nerd-only kind of way, then an open-source Unix OS like Linux is your only option. If it just has to work, Linux is good too. You just need to know what you're doing. It's not true at all that you have to keep on tinkering.
That's before we get onto the other problems with Debians, including the fact that it's run by freetard imbeciles. But that's a rant for another night.
Dude! Thats harsh!
Apple OSX: designed by normal people for normal people.
Windows Windows: designed by SW engineers for SW engineers.
Linux: Designed by freetard imbeciles for.........
Apple OSX: designed by normal people for normal people.
Windows Windows: designed by SW engineers for SW engineers.
Linux: Designed by freetard imbeciles for.........
Linux: designed by Bell Labs researches 40 years ago
Last year I salvaged part of an SGI Altix 350, a supercomputing cluster that uses IA64 CPUs. Debian is arguably the most sane OS that could support the relatively esoteric hardware that the Altix uses (choices were Debian, an outdated version of CentOS, or *shudders* Gentoo). So, I pop in the Debian IA64 CD, boot up, and it's going smoothly till I get a message -
"Your system contains hardware that requires non-free firmware"
In reference to the system's Qlogic hard drive controller. Now, the Debian repos actually have a package containing the firmware for the system, but they do not include this as part of the installation environment because it isn't kosher to some fat guy with Asperger's syndrome. (http://eirikp.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/richard_stallman_saintignucius.jpg) But hey, what dip**** would want to do something as stupid as access a computer's hard drive during OS installation when they can have fully GPL compliant software?
So, they do provide a way around this - by inserting the firmware binary onto a floppy disk or appropriately formatted floppy disk or USB stick. Problem - I'm using a chunk of a supercomputer, not a desktop PC. This thing doesn't have any USB ports, and it certainly doesn't have any floppy drives. Now, in theory, I could have opened the thing up and inserted a PCI USB card into it, but the thing was all racked and wired up, and I wasn't in the mood for undoing this and removing a load of fiddly screws to install something that may or may not have worked, so I investigated the possibility of including the firmware on the CD.
Many wasted CD-Rs and clumps of ripped our hair later, I Google around, and find a (relatively recent) thread on the Debian mailing list that went something like this -
Unsuspecting user: Is it possible to include firmware on a Debian installer disk?
Debian devs: Hurr hurr hurr why would you ever want to do that lol?!?!?!?111
I tried escaping to a shell on the installer disk, wget'ing the binary from the internet and copying it into all the system firmware folders. But no, the Debian installer doesn't work that way, so that achieved nothing.
I eventually had to install CentOS on the machine and use it to bootstrap Debian. That worked, but nonetheless, the story illustrates an important problem with the open source software community - so many of the shots are called by people who see functionality and user friendly operation as secondary to lofty ideals about open source software. Now, I like open source as much as the next guy who knows half a thing about computers, but I like working computers even more, and I disapprove when people deliberately break things to make some bull**** point that 99% of the computer using population couldn't give a flying **** about.
/rant
And lest you think I'm exagerating, here are the actual instructions I'm talking about:That is pretty bad. Yes, Linux can be a pain. If you happen to be lucky, and you have a machine whose hardware is fully supported, though, you won't have this particular pain - which is one of the worst ones with Linux.
Not sure if Debian is really at fault here. You may not like their politics or philosophy but that doesn't put them in the wrong.
I wouldn't say that they were the same type of people. The BSD crowd were/are more than happy for their code to be commercialized. Certainly not quite as insane as Stallman and his chums *
BSD Unix originated in the late 70s when one of the research departments in Berkley rewrote System 7 Unix so that they would be free from AT&T licensing restrictions on 'official' Unix.
[size=-2]*Linus Torvalds is meant to be a pretty sensible guy, and has always maintained that his use of the GPL license for the Linux kernel was for practical reasons, not philosophical[/size]
Really it boils down to how much time you have allocated to spend learning about how the software on your computer(s) work to how much control you really have over your system.
With Linux (and many *nix systems) you have full control (provided you have the knowledge). For example, if you don't like the process scheduler, you can write (or get the source for another one).
With Windows, sure it'll probably just work most (if not all) of the time. But if some Microsoft code is doing something you'd rather it didn't, typically you're **** of out luck (you code write some program to cover up this *defect*, but really you're just covering it up rather than fixing the problem at hand). ...
(Mac OS follows a similar vein as Windows)
But at the end of the day, it's what you're willing to sacrifice in order to get your computing done.
Sure Windows/Mac OSX costs money, but the time required to get familiar with the system is quite a bit lower. Unfortunately your "control" of what is actually going on is not very high (apart from choosing which desktop app to run).
Linux (in general), takes a lot more time to master. But you really have full control of what is going on in your system (if you so choose to exercise). ...
I'd recommend using Windows 2000 or XP. You don't have to type confusing commands into configuration files in order to install your wireless drivers.
I'm perfectly happy for people to run around chasing the Free Software(TM) dream, just as long as I dont have to have them interfere with how I use my computer.
I'd recommend OS X. It just works.
I get your frustration but it's kinda funny that the only OS you could find to do what you needed was put together by a bunch of "insane" hackers. You are talking about the entire philosophy behind Debian. They put together software for you for free based on their own principles and you complain about how they've done it. :)
Did you check out NetBSD?
I also use Ubuntu. All of my wireless cards have worked on Ubuntu just by plugging them in, I had to do absolutely nothing.
Which cards?
Which cards?
Probably ones with Atheros chipsets.
The problem was that the hardware only really works with the Linux kernel because SGI intended Linux to run on it, and thus they put a lot of code into the Linux kernel to support it. So the reason it runs is not because of the free software crowd, but the companies who use it. (In fact, a lot of the development of the Linux kernel and the related OS components has come from corporate users)
I really wanted to run some flavor of BSD on it, but AFAIK, nothing supports the NUMA architecture that is used to link the two nodes of the system that I have together.
And then, because it uses the ill-fated IA64 architecture, there are very few serious Linux distributions that support it that are usable. When I got Debian running on it in the end, I ran into problems with stupid defaults in the kernel configuration (a new kernel gave wifi and bluetooth support on an architecture that you'd never use such things, but took away support for the XFS file system, which I was using on one of the machines' disks) and things breaking when certain new software needed to be put on it. That, and the IA64 port of Debian isn't up to the same standards as the x86 one (a pretty common problem across most open source OS projects admittedly) I'm actually considering running Gentoo on it - it will take ages to get set up, but at least I don't have to administrate in a straight jacket.
Which cards?
Probably ones with Atheros chipsets.
All PCMCIA. One Netgear 802.11g, which I broke. A replacement Belkin 802.11g, and a Belkin 802.11n. And yes, I believe they all were Atheros based.
I'd recommend OS X. It just works.
It works flawlessly on that 5% while windows runs flawlessly on none.
Windows 7 runs flawlessly on the 3 machines I run it on.
Last year I salvaged part of an SGI Altix 350, a supercomputing cluster that uses IA64 CPUs. Debian is arguably the most sane OS that could support the relatively esoteric hardware that the Altix uses (choices were Debian, an outdated version of CentOS, or *shudders* Gentoo). So, I pop in the Debian IA64 CD, boot up, and it's going smoothly till I get a message -
"Your system contains hardware that requires non-free firmware"
In reference to the system's Qlogic hard drive controller. Now, the Debian repos actually have a package containing the firmware for the system, but they do not include this as part of the installation environment because it isn't kosher to some fat guy with Asperger's syndrome. (http://eirikp.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/richard_stallman_saintignucius.jpg) But hey, what dip**** would want to do something as stupid as access a computer's hard drive during OS installation when they can have fully GPL compliant software?
I had a AMD K7 which had a defective floating point blah blah something in the chip that after a couple hours of use, depending on what I was doing, it would kernel panic. It never happened in Windows though oddly enough.
That is very unlikely. Bet on faulty RAM.
That is very unlikely. Bet on faulty RAM.
I don't need any "RAM Optomizing" programs because I use Windows 2000 without extra crap running in the background. On a system like that, 512MB of RAM's more than enough to get the job done well.
I'm so masochistic, I use Seagate HDDs for RAM and Iomega Zip Drives for storage. With all the clicking and thrashing I can barely hear myself think, and I like it!
my cpu's registers are on floppies and the cache is on sequential access tape.
What, no paper tape?Show Image(http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HtmlHelp/Images2/PaperTape3.gif)
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 4050 3625 425 0 158 2320
-/+ buffers/cache: 1146 2904
Swap: 1992 0 1992
I know that ramdisks have gone a bit out of fashion these days, but I still like to have a small 512MB ramdisk (out of the systems 6GB RAM) for the web browser's "disk" cache. The reason? Although Firefox has a memory cache and a disk cache, the memory cache is dropped when you exit Firefox. The disk cache is persistant. Not having to go back to the hard disk all the time gives a huge performance benefit if the disk is being hammered for other reasons.
Archlinux would be my preferred choice but they dropped ATI support pretty hard for the video cards because of the open source drivers being trash(iirc.) If I had an nvidia card I'd use it if I didn't play any games.
Have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard so that's my *nix fix.
It didn't at the time I tried it. Someone on the forums had a tutorial on how to get it to work but it involved a lot of downgrading things, ended up being too much trouble to bother with.
It may now though, haven't checked recently.
Now that Linus Torvalds is American and his children hold American passports I'm sure every Linux install has NSA hooks embedded deep into the kernal.
Windows Vista / 7 memory management is superior to everything that came before it (and so it satisfies the topic, Linux memory management gets a thumbs up too, even though it doesn't cache aggressively). Your views may hold more merit for the last era of computing where you had to scrounge for Kilobits. RAM is there to be used. If not used, it is wasted. Windows 7 eats up as much RAM as it can while there are no processes in need of it, so that programs can start quicker and the system becomes more responsive. It's called SuperFetch, learn it. The notion that you would have to optimize RAM is so ridiculous nowadays, I'm surprised that the guys who write these programs do so with a straight face.
We can be conscious about good programming practice and therefore low-footprint programs, and still use an OS that will cache Gigabits of our RAM just because it can. These two are not mutually exclusive, they rather complement each other well. I understand that we may get a bit OCD about memory and system tidiness in general, but that doesn't mean we can't get better and realize we have it completely backwards.
And no, (gasp) Windows 7 is not a RAM hog. 1.5 out of 4 Gig cached does not equal 1.5 Gig used by the system. Look at Task Manager, Processes. THAT is what the system uses. System processes don't occupy more than ~200 MB.
Edit: do unix geeks still brag about not having to reboot as much as windows? When I used ubuntu, I had to reboot my machine way more often than my win 7 machine.
lherzog@xunt:~$ uptime
07:58:40 up 645 days, 21:36, 1 user, load average: 7.05, 5.60, 3.76
lherzog@xunt:~$
lherzog@xunt:~$ date
Sun Dec 26 08:03:41 CST 2010
lherzog@xunt:~$
Unix geeks...how DO they work???Show Image(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1i7EX7a2ELY/TNGQTqb7zYI/AAAAAAAAAck/mWXFvXiS7Tw/s1600/linuxgeek.jpg)
How do I get rid of that funk that is appearing after SPECIAL embedded video blocks?
Only times I ever had to reboot on *nix was when I updated a kernel. I have to reboot Windows * whenever I install/uninstall some programs, most updates, etc.
Code: [Select]lherzog@xunt:~$ uptime
07:58:40 up 645 days, 21:36, 1 user, load average: 7.05, 5.60, 3.76
lherzog@xunt:~$
lherzog@xunt:~$ date
Sun Dec 26 08:03:41 CST 2010
lherzog@xunt:~$
holy load avg batmanIt's a quad-core system...so not as bad as it might appear. :)