Gnaw

The machine in question is an Acer Aspire 5315-2122. It comes with the Mobile Intel (965, I believe) Media Accelerator x3100, a 2.0 GHz Celeryon 550 CPU, 1gig of DDR2 RAM, an 80gig HDD, and (drum-roll) an Atheros ar242x-based 802.11g (and b) wireless card. I had been setting it up for a friend… It appears they don’t want it now (gosh, what will I do?).

I got the little beastie and did what I always do… I deleted EVERY virus-absorbing partition on the hard disk and then created a Linux Swap partition and an EXT3 partition. Then I installed my primary distro of choice for laptops (Xandros 4.1).

It was pretty sad. It was your typical intel-hda sound, but this had an extra “H” in the model number, and nothing would make it happy. Sound is one of my prerequisites, and this was the first time Xandros ever failed me with such extreme prejudice. So, I moved on to my secondary distro of choice (SimplyMEPIS), but this turned out to be more of the same, and then some.

Truth be told, I mostly use MEPIS everywhere, now.

Considering that the two distros that never fail me had become intractable pains on this Aspire 5315 (-2122), I opted to try some of the distros I absolutely hate (Fedora and SuSE). The Redhat kernel still pisses me off with its flighty temperament, RPM management still sucks sour owl doodie, and SuSE never could get through a complete install without spontaneously rebooting. People crow and laud YAST, but to me it is Yet Another Silly Try at something that Debian has had right for a long, long time.

I searched my soul about my next move, and decided to give the evil stepsister to the even more Evile Ubuntu a try…that would be Kubuntu…

Since I’d already tried the hoary roadkill and all of its predecessors, I decided it was time to give the Hardly Heron, or Kubuntu 8.04, a try.

Now, I know that the Holy Church of the OS Faithful™ are going to descend upon me like a hoard of locusts, and the People’s Republic of Linux™ henchboiz will be in full ridiculosity, but I have some fair gripes with the K/X/Edu/Mythu/Buzillib/Ubuntu offshoot of Debian. Aside from the fact that none of them have ever gotten my hardware right (even when I configured them in precisely the manner required), the reliance of ONE password to use AND administer a computer goes against every fiber in my security-geek soul. Worse, the reliance on sudo to be the PRIMARY (single-password) admin gatekeeper is utterly whacked.

People can say what they want, but my concerns are valid and well beyond proof-of-concept (additionally, I’ve got 21+ some-odd years of using POSIX-compliant operating systems — UNIX, XENIX, AIX, and MINIX — under my belt, and I’ve been computing for 30 years). I don’t care that I can’t log in to a window manager session as root, because I NEVER do that. I do care that all administration happens through sudo, and with the same password as the user logon…

That password situation is completely unacceptable to me. Sure, I’ve read all the forums, the pundits, the Ubuntu faithful, and they have yet to actually prove that their security model is better than a totally separate root account with a totally different password and totally kicking sudo out of the sole admin middleman position. Nothing they can say will change the reality here. I mean NOTHING, NADA, ZILCH, ZED, ZIPPO, DEGIL BU! They say “you’ll get used to it and then you’ll never want to go back.” BAH! FEH! PUH! I know what I like and I know why I like it, and I’m not budging.

Now, with that out and in the open (just so everyone knows where I’m coming from…not that I’m opinionated, mind you), I burned the Kubuntu…oh, wait…there’s one more thing…

GNOME SUCKS! (just so you know how I really feel about it) It is like computing with dark glasses in a room without windows (and with flickering, overhead fluorescent lighting) whilst wearing arctic mittens. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some great ideas in Gnome, it just means that, overall, I think it sucks. I keep checking it out, and it just keeps on sucking (but it does have some little sparklies-of-goodness inside of it, and it is clear that the developers have it thoroughly thought-out…just not for me). Some people really LOVE Gnome, and I’m glad it exists for them (honestly, I am). The freedom to choose is good!

Now, back to that new Kubuntu 8.04 (beta, I believe) CD… Fresh off the burner, and newly labelled, I popped that puppy into the Aspire 5315 (-2122), selected “Install,” and let it rip. And, for the first time ever (make that EVER), it not only found everything, it configured 94ish% of it. The unconfigured 6% was the Atheros ar242x wireless. It made a valiant try with madwifi, but it couldn’t do it.

I downloaded madwifi 0.9.4 and compiled it and that failed as well. I believe that someone in the SimplyMEPIS forum has patched 0.9.4, but I left all those tabs in Firefox when I closed its window. Either way, madwifi needs to be patched before the ar242x (5007) wifi card will work.

So, I installed ndiswrapper and found three different XP drivers for the Atheros 5007ish wireless card. Only one of them worked well, and it worked (works) very, very well (one of them locked up Kubuntu so harshly that I had to give it the ten-second-finger-of-death. I don’t remember the last time I had to do that for something like ndiswrapper. It didn’t dump the core, and I haven’t checked to see if the kernel in Kubuntu is set to do that. I was especially grateful to see the knetwork manager kicker applet make a kwallet request for privs (and it continues to ask every time I boot it, which is a definite plus in my book).

With a minor amount of hacking I got sudo to accept a password that is not my user password, so I can live with this situation (but with a bad taste in my mouth). My level of snark on this matter will not be diminished!!!!11!!!one!!

What to say about Kubunut 8.04? I mean, I guess that really is the crux of all this nonsense here, so I need to come clean…

Damn, I think Ubuntu finally got it right, nearly all of it! Kubuntu 8.04 really rocks the desktop. Adept is a little bit quirky to me, but it is clear enough about most of the things it is doing, and the deb packaging system is nearly perfect (especially compared to rpm). I have some minor concern about stability with the newer kernel, but time will tell, and that is easy enough to correct as more people start using it. I will say that if you are installing Kubuntu on a machine with built-in wireless you should leave the network cable connected long enough to install ndiswrapper. I also think that the average K/Ubuntu user will benefit from the installation of the GTK frontend for ndiswrapper (it eliminates the command line entirely, which I believe most people will appreciate). I saw the GTK frontend listed when I searched Adept for “ndiswrapper,” so I know it is there for 8.04.

I am happy (surprised, actually) to say that I have finally made peace with the K/ubuntu family, and I am thoroughly enjoying using Kubuntu 8.04 on the laptop that my friend no longer wants (so sad).

I now feel that Kubuntu is mature enough to become a Linux Desktop superhero, and I have no qualms about recommending release 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to anyone. Just don’t tell my friends that I said that. Bravo Zulu, Ubuntu Folks!

Kubuntu:
http://www.kubuntu.org/

That XP driver that worked for me with ndiswrapper:
Atheros_5007EG_wlan_drivers.zip

madwifi:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82936

EDIT: 02 May 2008

So far, so good. I’m going to spend a couple months giving it a thorough workout and see how it goes.

EDIT: 05 May 2008

Items to check out and cover with Kubuntu 8.04 and my Acer Aspire 5315-2122:

• NIC
• Wireless
• Modem
• Video
• Audio
• DVD/CD writing/reading
• DVD playing
• Codecs
• PDBV listing
• MIME file types supported, or that can be supported with additional install
• Performance
• Battery life
• Stability/recovery
• Miscellaneous stuff that only I would likely care about

No sooner I’d said it,
Hell had to be paid;
Sanctimonious bombastics,
Via Email relayed;

Computing as religion,
More rancid with age;
Bleating fanboy derision,
Affecting smug envisage;

In thirty, short years,
Not one thing has changed;
The names and the rancor,
Flames from the deranged;

PET versus Trash-80,
VIC-20 and more;
Amiga, Atari ST,
Commodore 64;

MINIX, X, Motif,
Sixteen-bit, twenty-four;
Bitmap, JPEG, GIF,
PC standards and lore;

Win3 and its Workgroups,
DOS stole CP/M;
WinME…a big-whoops,
68k from Big-M;

AMD and Cyrix,
IBM, Motorola;
Intel chip hysterics,
My chipset will floor’ya;

Not Vista, but XP,
KDE, but not Gnome;
MacOS is so EZ,
Linux ain’t for the home;

The flames they are not new,
The arguments — so old;
Posturing ’til they turn blue,
The keyboard makes bold;

They’ll deride and abuse you,
OS-Gods rip you to tatters;
They miss what is most true,
It just doesn’t matter!


Wally Wilson
06April2008 @ 1629 - First Draft
06April2008 @ 1817 - Second Draft

P.S. - This is my response to the Emails from a few fanboi flamers

Someone, somewhere else, lovingly posted pictures of their new (and wonderful) laptop. At that point in my Blog-browsing, my laptop became extremely jealous of Olivia’s new friend and conspired with my Web browser to go back a page out of pure spite. So, this is where I brag it up and try to make nice with it.

Laptron2007 (an Acer Aspire 3690) seems to be a hardy enough breed, and has triumphed over many computational conquers. It has a 1.6gHz CeleryOn™ processor, 512megs of RAM, and 72ish gigs of hard disk space. Best yet, I only paid (only?) US$599 for it at the ever-chic RatShack™ (8 blocks from home).

I then deleted every last partition on it, created a 2gig Linux swap partition and a 72gig EXT3 partition. Then I installed Xandros 3 Deluxe (approximately US$40), and was happy. I don’t dual-boot…dual-booting is a sure sign of OS insecurity, and folks should just get over it and make a choice (IMEO).

Then I installed Xandros 4 Home Edition - Premium (another US$40ish for the upgrade). It is now running 4.1 (or, Xandros 4 SP1) with kernel 2.6.18-dcc-smp and KDE 3.4.2. Xandros desktop Linux is worth the money — especially if you have a laptop. Modems just work, wireless is magical,
Samba just works, NTFS read/write is flawless, it includes Crossover Office (in case you need it), it is stable, stable, stable, and it is Debian-based (a necessity in my book).

I’ve been distro-surfing since the first “distros” showed up, and moved to Linux from MINIX. I know there are a lot of folks who disparage paying for a Linux distro, but I never did sign up for the People’s Republic of Linux™…I just don’t buy into that computer OS religion crap. Let the kids be True Believers™, I just need to get things done in an MS-dominated world, so things just have to work. I have other things to tweak and pimp-out. Although, having a yellow rubber duckie for a launch menu button might not be the norm.

I also have a SimplyMEPIS (version 7) machine, and I do what I can to support all sorts of things and groups and people and stuff (and things)…but I have a life, so things like photography and fly-tying and playing in the mud often take the top of the list (as do house repairs/improvements).

I also have improvised the TMSTSI™ (Too Many Stickers To Steal It) theft deterrent system. Too many stickers means “ugly,” and hard to just walk away without instantly being noticed. I don’t rely on it, but my laptop likes the bling, and I’m all about keeping my baby happy.

Ok, some pics…

1 2 3

dp