DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not – but hey, at least it's free!)

In an effort to cleanse my wife’s computer of the spyware that dogged it so, I removed all the Linux partitions from my computer to make space for files. I got her computer rebuilt, and I’ll be starting from scratch when I get back into it. No worries, though – if I’m going to get any good at setting it up… Kind of reminds me of a joke – a guy in New York asks an old man on the street, “Hey, how do you get to Radio City Music Hall?” The old guy responds, “Practice, practice, practice!”

In looking toward renewed Linux experimentation, I downloaded the .ISO files for FC2. I’m going to start with that, and see if I have any better luck getting my network card to work.

In setting up my “I’m gonna use this for a while” environment on WXP, I’ve stumbled across what I feel are two gems. These are the FireFox browser (which I’ve been using for a while now) and the Thunderbird mail program. Thunderbird is not as fully featured as Ximian Evolution, but I prefer it’s interface to that of Mozilla Mail. I also think that once I get back on Linux on a regular basis, I’ll install the same version there, and see if I can get my mail to use the same data files whether I’m using Linux or WXP.

With my inability to get my network working, I have resigned myself to running WXP.  Work is starting to get really busy, and my personal life is as well.  Maybe at some point in the future I can fire things back up and play some more.

A user wrote back and suggested that I try a driver from SourMilk.net, which is an “adm8211″ driver project for Linux. When I downloaded it and started to compile it, I quickly became aware that it hoped I was on the 2.6 family of kernels (which is what the Fedora Project, and several of the newer distributions, are now using). WBEL 3.0 uses the 2.4 kernel, which is more established, but is beginning to drop off as most folks start developing for 2.6. Anyway, there was a 2.4 make file, but it was labeled “experimental.”

That pretty much describes how I spent my time this evening – experimenting. I have virtually no experience with large-scale C projects, and I got many, many compile errors. I tried tweaking the make file, to no avail. I don’t fault the driver, as it said up front that it is really targeted to 2.6. I may end up downloading a 2.6 distribution and trying it out.

I tried a few other things to make that module work, but nothing seemed to help. It’s also very difficult to download and try new things when you can’t get to the Internet to download them. I also posted a message to the WBEL user’s list, and rather than go into that detail, that message can be found here.

My wife bought me a wireless network card, so I could move the second computer out of the living room (or, as she calls it, “not a computer lab!”). Everything works okay under WXP, but when I boot to Linux, no joy. (I sort of expected that, at this point…) I downloaded the Red Hat 8 drivers from iBlitzz’s website, but the interface for a network card is what’s called a “kernel module,” which is, as best I can tell, a highly-specialized object module that tells the kernel all the details of the hardware. At any rate, the kernel module is very much tied to a particular version of kernel, so the RH8 doesn’t seem to be working. Oh well – time to play with my new toy – WXP for now.

Wine is not getting me drunk. I installed it, downloaded and installed WineSetupTK to assist with configuration. I then ran the setup program (through wine) for Thomas the Tank Engine: The Great Festival Adventure. Once that completed, I tried to run the program (by entering [wine "C:\Program Files\Hasbro Interactive\The Great Festival Adventure\thomas.exe"]) and got a message box saying “CD check path not found.” I searched the web for this message, and didn’t find anything – it may be a message from the game, and not wine. I’ll do some digging later.

You may remember the problems I had with the Folding@Home client. So, I decided to try to run the Windows version through wine. I downloaded it, and ran it through wine. It took about 2 minutes to lock my machine up. I’m not being too hard on wine for this stuff – an emulator isn’t going to be 100%. I am concerned that I don’t seem to be able to run any sort of Folding@Home client, and since it’s not open-source, I can’t try compiling on this computer.

I uninstalled the OpenOffice.org suite from the /root directory, and installed it in /usr/local/OpenOffice.org1.1.2 (which was where it suggested). Now, it works for normal users. I still haven’t been able to resolve my printing problems, but I sent a question today to the WBEL users list – they came through quickly for helping me resolve my mail importing issues.

Today I didn’t do a whole lot – I deleted the dupes out of my inbox subfolders, and I downloaded wine. I’ll install it tomorrow.