Thursday, May 20, 2004

Gnome 2.6 rocks!

I was a little worried about how I would like the 2.6 nautilus interface. Especially when I read a bad review.

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,92934,00.html

I love the new spacial setting. This is a new way to look at desktop managment and it takes a while to get used to it. The annoying part is that a new window will open up for every folder when you left click.

After using it for a while it seems obvious why it is there. The Gnome Development team realized that people can easily remember items spacially, so when you open your home folder it always will show up in the same location you left it and the same size. This unconsciously helps me know what folder I am working in.

Nobody wants to see more than 3 folder windows on the desktop, so you have to press Ctl-Shift-W or when you click on a new folder you can use the middle mouse button or press the scroll wheel. It does take some time getting used to the new commands. I have my system set up to work with a single click which helps.

Gnome 2.6 on Debian

I finally upgraded Gnome to 2.6 after reading that the package maintainers said it was ready for unstable but that Gnome 2.4 first had to be integrated into testing.

http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?GnomeTwoDotSixFAQ

Q: When will GNOME 2.6 go into sid/sarge?

A: When it is ready and when sarge and sid are ready for it. This means that we have to wait until the GNOME 2.4 packages in sarge are not expected to break, as we can't update them after we've uploaded GNOME 2.6 to unstable. This means you can help us by testing the old GNOME 2.4! Yay!

Friday, May 14, 2004

Working on Software Suspend

I have a nice Debian laptop that I would like to get software suspend to work on.

http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/

As I understand it, my current 2.6.5 kernel will work in a limited way.

Working on Jengine with Debian

I am attempting to get jengine (www.jengine.org), an HL7 interface engine, to work with Debian. It is open source (GPL) however it is written in java. It is a mess trying to load suns java sdk.

I have heard that java is pretty much open source too. However, it doesn't allow for distributions to distribute the code or something. I am also concerned that there is a lot of optimization that I will have to do.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

My Syntax USB-400 Debian instructions (prism2_usb)

I was able to get the Syntax USB-400 wireless USB to work under Debian Linux by downloading and building the linux-wlan-ng-0.2.1-pre20 modules with all drivers.

You are going to need the source code to your kernel at /usr/src/linux (create the symbolic link or rename the folder). Copy your distributions configuration file from the /boot/ folder (Debian names it something like config-2.6.5). You will have to have some kernel parts compiled in order for the linux-wlan-ng module to work. I ended up creating a whole new kernel.

Run the ./Configure from the linux-wlan-ng folder. It asks you some basic setup questions and attempts to load everything. This didn't work for me. I then ran 'make all' and 'make install' to have all modules built and installed into the correct /lib/modules/'uname -r'/ folder. Run 'depmod' and 'modprobe -l | grep prism' to see if you have the prism2_usb module. Then load the module with 'modprobe prism2_usb', the 80211b driver also will get loaded.

I was also able to have hotplug (http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/) recognize my toy by copying the output of 'cat /lib/modules/'uname -r'/modules.usbmap | grep prism2_usb' to /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap. I think this is what I used 'cat /lib/modules/'uname -r'/modules.usbmap | grep prism2_usb >> /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap'

Now I don't have to have the USB-400 plugged into my laptop until I am ready to use it.

To have it connect to a wireless network, I had to change the /etc/network/interfaces to include:
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless_mode managed
wireless_essid default

#default was the name of my router I wanted to connect to.