Update 20090713 am – Miscellaneous

#! JWMRC STILL TO-DO
I didn’t boot back into #! until late last night. I’ll try to edit the jwmrc later. I’ll add screenshots to the previous entry momentarily.

DSL ISN’T DEBIAN-LITE, IT’S NOT A JUMPSTART TO DEBIAN-STABLE!
I still get a ton of hits for DSL-related things. I see in the search engine terms for today that I already have someone looking for how to use DSL to install Debian. Don’t! I can’t believe people still think they can do this but it’s not a jumpstart to a small Debian system. Go read my hard drive install page linked up in the top right-hand corner on my blog (click on the banner to to “home” if you’ve landed here and the links in the right column aren’t visible).

In a nutshell, DSL was based on an old version of Knoppix which was based on a now-deprecated version of Debian. Debian no longer offers any support for that version (which was called Woody). You cannot do a dist-upgrade from DSL to Debian-stable without breaking every freaking thing in the system.

You can still use DSL as it is but it appears development has ended. I haven’t seen if John Andrews has posted a roadmap or even announced what he’s doing development-wise.

If you want a small-ish Debian system, the best idea I’ve seen is Kerry’s which he’s posted in various forums including at DSL, IIRC. I searched and found it at the Ubuntu forums again just now. You can use that with any net-install-able distro like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. The BSDs require a bit more work but also can be used to create lighter systems. Etc. If your computer can run Slitaz or a POS distro like Puppy, you can run Tiny Core and build a light system, too.

WIFI BS
I’m still a bit anxious about how this Atheros card is performing under Linux. I’d hoped the more recent kernel in #! would resolve the matter. I’d suspended and resumed a few times to see if it would flake out on me, but what happened yesterday was the longest time it had been suspended while running #!.

I’m also noticing that my transfer rate is swinging wildly from 1 mb/s to 54 mb/s. I’m going to have to delve through more bug reports and see wtf is happening. I knew the other stuff I’d experienced with older (and apparently not patched as much as I thought) kernels was a known issue. I haven’t looked to see if any other reports have been filed since the big re-write. I compared my signal using my old ThinkPad which uses a Broadcom card and the wireless signal strength, transfer rate, etc., seems more stable with it.

I also need to double check my warranty. I know it’s supposed to be one year but I don’t remember the fine print to see how nitpicky it is. If it’s voided, I may bust this thing up and find another card.

(Edit: Signal strength and rate isn’t an issue in Windows, only in Linux. I likely won’t change the card unless I decide against upgrading to Windows 7.)

oh no not again

Suspended the AA1 while running crunchbang when I left to work out. Got back, checked to resume before taking a shower. Network not connected, which is as it should be when the system suspends. I’d added a script to put more network stats in conky and noticed the SSID was listed as that lone unencrypted AP in my neighborhood and not mine. Again, I kind of expected that because it’s been associating with that AP before trying my hidden SSID even though I don’t think it should (ever) do that.

Waited, waited, waited. Nothing.

Opened terminal. Did a quick iwconfig and iwlist. I then saw that wlan0 couldn’t scan, which is what had been happening with the old kernel under Fedora.

Fuck. Not again.

So I rebooted into #!. No network, same SSID (not mine), etc. Checked iwlist again. No scanning.

(Edit to add screenshot. ImageMagick didn’t capture the space where conky was behind terminator for some reason. That SSID isn’t mine, it’s the one some idiot turned on without changing any default settings or turning on encryption.)

Fuck. Not again. How fucking dare it do this.

Back in Windows now after more issues which persisted — again — even after using Linux. That’s right — once again the “problem” persisted a reboot in Linux and after booting into Windows. It’s done that every goddamn time I’ve gone through this shit. The card works fine under Windows in every other circumstance. Zero problems before I ever ran Linux on it, zero while suspending and resuming all fucking day and night long for weeks at a time when not dealing with Linux.

When I first booted into Windows this time, I couldn’t see any SSIDs. I also couldn’t do anything because it locks up while trying to connect to network printers, to check security software updates, etc.

The solution is the same as before and I don’t know why the hell this works under Windows but not under Linux, let alone why the problem continues from one operating system to another. I suspended in Windows, waited for all the stuff to come to a stop, then opened the netbook, resumed. Voila, the beautiful orange-ish wireless LED once again fired immediately upon resume and I’m again able to use this wireless card.

And before anyone suggests I add lines to various files in /etc to restart wireless  when resuming, that didn’t help before. I also don’t see how it could possibly help now, either, considering I couldn’t fucking scan for any SSID by the time I could even open a terminal.

I just wasted another half an hour of my life trying to deal with this bullshit once again.

Maybe that should be my clue to be done with it and use what actually works correctly.

I’ll get around to editing everything I said I would later, if I decide to boot back into #! today. I’ll edit this post to add screenshots if or whenever I do.

Fiddling with emacs and ratmenu

I’ve been setting up some things for emacs and my window managers this morning. First, I got all my .emacs files together (the ones currently in use plus the backups I could find) and unified as much as possible. Then I set up weblogger.el on my AA1 (sorry to those whose RSS readers got broken links after I removed my test entries). Think it’s working better now. Either that or I’ll get pwnt soon.

I also worked on ratmenu-ing this morning. There’s really no difference between it and ratmen in terms of execution, but ratmen wasn’t available in the repositories so ratmenu it is. I put together a few menus I can launch from within jwm or ratpoison (which I finally installed while ago). I also made a cheatsheet I can get from the jwm menu to remind me of the ratmenu bindings and the keys for reconfiguring jwm to match the openbox bindings from #!. I need to edit it for the rest I set up and probably add  some of the other cryptic bindings I did.

The “audio” menu is my favorite. I’ll explain when I post my jwmrc. I should have time to finish editing the #! jwmrc later today and will post ASAP in case anyone’s interested in one that will allow a (hopefully) seamless transition from openbox to jwm, which is much lighter and has most, if not all, the parts used in the default #! desktop.

Also on my to-do list at some point is hitting the wikis and figuring out how to silence the fucking fan on this thing. I don’t remember it running non-stop in Fedora or PCLOS. I know it doesn’t in Windows.