Fortiter Et Recte
With Linux kernel 2.6.30 well on the way, Tuz has finally taken a bow and left the stage. Thanks to all who helped raise funds for the Save The Tasmanian Devil foundation at Linux.conf.au this year. Thanks also to Linus for offering to replace Tux for a release and of course Rusty for his patch.
-c
My first article for Linux Magazine has just gone live.
The TomTom case exposed a long-simmering problem resulting from the combination of patents, proprietary software companies and open source. Andrew Tridgell recently patched Linux’s VFAT implementation, but the cult of silence that surrounds intellectual property will bedevil open source projects for some time to come.
Feedback welcome!
-c
I’ve been helping a friend at work get Linux on her laptop. I installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 as this is quite good for new users (and we have a mirror at work). She connects to the Internet like many people these days, using a USB 3G modem. Her provider is Dodo, which actually uses the Optus network.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged in the device and Network Manager popped up a wizard prompting for a new connection. Yep, the device just works on Linux.
Unfortunately there is no “Dodo” profile the Network Manager, but knowing it runs on Optus network I chose “Optus 3G”. I booted into Windows to get the APN, as it will be different to Optus. After changing that I just needed to click on the Network Manager applet and tell it to connect. But it didn’t work. It tried to log on, everything goes green and then BAM. Nothing.
There was obviously something else that was needed. I checked the settings and saw that the Optus profile had DNS servers hard coded. I grabbed the DNS servers that dodo uses and put them in instead. This time everything worked and I could log on. Internet, she was a working.
So, for anyone already with Dodo or thinking about it, here are the settings I used.
Number: *99#
APN: dodolns1 (that's a letter "L")
Authentication: CHAP
DNS: 202.136.43.197, 202.136.42.229
You will need to register your account with Dodo first and activate it. After that, your Internet should work just fine by using these settings.
It seems that it’s often quite slow when compared to Windows, which I’m putting this down to the Linux driver. Speeds seem to range between 600b/sec and 50kb/sec, which is a little disappointing. It could just be signal or something else, I’m not sure. Still, it’s great that it works out of the box under Linux. Now if only I could get Mike’s friend’s Telstra stick to do the same! HAL rules here I come..
-c
The New Zealand Python conference, KiwiPyCon, is on the way in November and recently had a competition to design a logo. I’m happy to say that the winner (with a Kiwi modification to the Python logo) was friend and fellow Canberra Linux User Group member, Jason Nielsen! He admits that his work is “Blatantly influenced by Jonathan Harkers design.” Never-the-less, it looks great! Simple and effective.
Congratulations J!
-c
Mike has a friend with an Acer Aspire One netbook (which he bought over 6 months ago) and it has been no end of trouble getting it to work properly. The main issue has been the horrible built-in Atheros wireless chip. There was much to-ing and fro-ing, the end result of which is that the guy wanted to buy a Windows netbook to replace it (all because of this one main issue). In fact, it’s been down right embarrassing that Linux doesn’t work. He’s wanted to give the rotten thing away, or rather, throw it away (preferably somewhere jagged with lots of rocks).
Eventually we did get it working with Intrepid and even though it was clunkalicious, it did work. Until he did an upgrade that is. So Jaunty comes along and everything is supposed to work out of the box, but it doesn’t. Wireless is still broken. The device is detected, but network manager just won’t work (also iwlist wlan0 scanning does not work).
I dug around on launchpad and found out, lo and behold, there is a bug that stops wireless from working.
The fix? Blacklist the acer_wmi module (add blacklist acer_wmi to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist) and reboot. Essentially the rfkill switch on the Aspire One is dodgy and it gets permanently set to off. Not loading this module prevents that, which means it’s free to be, well, on.
So, if you have an Acer Aspire One with Jaunty (or other distribution) and you don’t get any wireless love, try this work around. Now I just have to get his dodgy Telstra 3G USB modem device working.. and that’s a whole other level of pain.
-c