Linux

I finally got wireless working on my Dell laptop under Linux. It turned out my Linksys 802.11g PC card was v2 which uses a TI chipset rather than Broadcom. Installing the v2 Linksys driver with ndiswrapper got it working.

One annoying thing about Linksys and many other network hardware manufacturers is that they often use very different chipsets in the product while using the same model number. You can only tell by the serial number or version which one it uses. The WRT54G is especially notorious for this.

Wireless support in Linux just plain sucks. After trying to get WPA working on my Dell Inspiron for a few days, I finally gave up and switched my network back to WEP. I’m still having trouble to get it to connect to my network using my Linksys 802.11g PC card, even though it seems to recognize the card and is able to see the network.

Via Slashdot: El Lobo writes “For the Linux desktop, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continuously been fed point releases which added bits of functionality and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What’s going on? A big problem with GNOME is that it lacks any form of a vision, a goal, for the next big revision. GNOME 3.0 is just that- a name. All GNOME 3.0 has are some random ideas by random people in random places. KDE developers are indeed planning big things for KDE4 — but that is what they are stuck at. Show me where the results are. KDE’s biggest problem is a lack of manpower and financial backing by big companies. In the meantime, the competition has not exactly been standing still. Apple has continuously been improving its Mac OS X operating system. Microsoft has not been resting on its laurels either. Windows Vista is already available.”

I’m really looking forward to Linux kernel 2.6.20, which may be in the next Ubuntu release. A few days ago they announced PS3 support. Now they’ve added kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) support, which makes it a lot easier to implement virtualization software such as Xen.

XPressLinux has pretty much taken over all of my free time. Today I finally released a feature complete beta with all known issues fixed.

Scott gives an overview of some of the changes that we’ll see in Feisty here. One of the biggest changes will be an enhanced desktop with 3D effects and a more polished appearance. Networking is also improved and made easier, and it’ll be much easier to install third party packages without screwing up APT. It will also boot a lot faster by taking full advantage of Upstart.

Yesterday I had a discussion about the contrast between Windows and Linux. The biggest drawback of Linux is that it doesn’t have the same polished appearance as Mac OS X or Windows and there are a lot of rough edges. Also, font rendering is much worse than either Mac OS X or Windows.

Ubuntu needs to hire professional user interface designers and artists to make it look as good as Mac OS X. There also needs to be user interface standards for developers, so applications will appear more consistent. Having two major desktop environments, KDE and Gnome, doesn’t help with consistency.

Via SlashDot: Steve Ballmer claims Linux infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property:

“In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux ‘uses our intellectual property’ and Microsoft wanted to ‘get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation.'”

Further proof that Steve Ballmer is the true evil behind Microsoft. He’s deluded enough to actually believe that Microsoft innovates anything.

If the issue is Samba, as some of the comments claim, let’s just remove it from Linux and use NFS as the standard networking protocol.