I discovered yet one more reason for my insistence that Linux is still not ready for primetime as as desktop operating system.  Until recently, my biggest complaint was the lousy support for wireless cards using the Broadcom chip sets.  However, the version of Ubuntu Linux and the kernel I have installed now appears to have finally resolved this issue (at least for the ancient 802.11b/11g card in my laptop).  So much for that…on to my next rant.

I have an ancient (circa 2001) Dell Dimension 8200 desktop that uses Ubuntu Linux 9.10 as its operating system.  The hardware configuration includes:

• 2Ghz Pentium 4 CPU
• 512MB RAM
• Graphics Card with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 Graphics processor
• Dell D1025TM Monitor
• and a number of the other usual suspects.

When I did the initial install of Ubuntu 9.04, I let the installer choose the best configuration based on the hardware configuration and resources.  This included the Visual Effects, which the Ubuntu install set to “None.” This does not require the enhanced capabilities of the GeForce2 graphics processor. 

One day boredom set in and I decided to try the “Normal” configuration.  This required loading of the restricted (i.e., proprietary) NVIDIA driver for the GeForce2 MX/MX400, followed by a reboot of the system to install the driver. 

I encountered my first problem upon the system reboot.  The driver had set the screen resolution to 640x480.  I fumbled around with this for a while but finally got the resolution set to 1024x768 via the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility.  I did a reboot and everything looked fine…or least it did at first glance.   But, just as I was getting ready to congratulate myself on yet one more time beating Linux into submission, my smugness came to a screeching halt.  There was something missing in the application windows.  

I had no clue as to what happened.  My first thought was that I had  inadvertently done something to turn off the Titlebar display when I was changing the screen resolution.  I ran  the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility again and set everything to the default values except the screen resolution.  I rebooted, still had same problem.

I then set the visual effects back to “None” and rebooted, fully expecting to see no Titlebar.  Surprise, surprise…the missing Titlebar reappeared.   Big clue!  

Armed with this clue I went to the Big Help Desk in the Sky, otherwise known as Google.  Did a search on “Ubuntu NVIDIA Titlebar” and got a number of hits.  I soon found a solution to my problem at the Pen Drive Linux web site.  Here is an extract of the solution:

The following tutorial explains how to fix the Compiz Ubuntu Desktop Effects missing titlebar problem. If you've been toying around with Ubuntu 7.04 and have enabled Desktop Effects "Compiz", you might notice that the titlebar or window decorations have disappeared. This is a fairly common problem amongst systems using ATI or Nvidia video cards and commonly occurs after switching to a higher resolution. The fix is fairly simple.

The most telling information here regarding the state of screen drivers and Linux is the version of Ubuntu that the extract cites (Ubuntu 7.04, released in April 2007).  The version I had this problem with was Ubuntu 9.10, which was released in October 2009.  

By the way, the AddARGBVisuals and AddARGBLXVisuals options tells the driver to display (True) or hide (False) the window decorations, one of which is the Titlebar.

Ubuntu™ is a product of Canonical, Ltd™.
NVIDIA and GeForce are registered trademarks of the NVIDIA Corporation.

I recently completed a major update of my oldest internal Linux Server here at hrpr.com.  The server, whose name is Doofus,  is hosted on a Dell Dimension XPS T500 that has been in service here since April 1999. 

For the last eight years, Doofus has been running Slackware, which is a hard-core, no-frills, very stable Linux distribution that has been around since dirt was new.  If you aren't on speaking terms with command line shells such as Bash and are not familiar with the Linux Directory Structure and its contents, then Slackware is probably not for you. 

Back to the update stuff...

I was getting ready to download the latest, greatest version of Slackware and install it on Doofus when it suddenly occurred to me that I had recently downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and had made an installation CD-ROM for it.  It was the Desktop Edition, but as a local test server, it would do just fine.  I was also curious to see how GNOME would perform on a Pentium III with 256M of RAM.  After all, I was essentially starting with a blank slate and could revert back to Slackware if I really wasn't satisfied with Ubuntu.

I did the Ubuntu install and, as usual, it was fast and uneventful.  Doofus rebooted and up came the GNOME GUI.  And surprise, surprise!   It was quite responsive.  The mouse was responsive and GUI applications ran fast enough to meet my "wait-time" expectations.  Which really didn't matter much anyway since Doofus would be running 99.99999% of the time as a server with remote administrative access via SSH and/or Webmin.

I installed the LAMP stuff and a BOINC Client for running SETI at home tasks.  And that was it - Doofus was back online doing its thing.

I am still a Slackware fan and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys tinkering at the command line level and/or wants to learn Linux from the ground up.  However, Ubuntu brings added value such as automatic notification of security updates, a more feature rich software package manager and other administrative tools that make life a bit easier.

And who knows, next week I may change my mind again and install Slackware Linux on Doofus yet one more time.

I just finished updating my laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to the new Ubuntu 8.04 release.  All went well except for one thing.  In addition to many other improvements, Ubuntu 8.04 installed a new version (2.6.24-16) of the Linux kernel.  Now this would seem to be a good thing.  But, once again a Linux distribution failed my "Ready for Prime Time" test...which is to provide me with a working 802.11b/g, or "Wi-Fi," interface with little or no pain my part.

This issue with wireless interfaces is not unique to Ubuntu...I had the same problem with SUSE Linux in the past.  I won't go into the many reasons for the lack of robust wireless support in Linux as Google can find you many learned (and some not so learned) dissertations on that subject and many places to point the finger and fix the blame.

Having been faced with this problem in the past, I applied all my "lessons learned" in an attempt to fix it.  But much to my chagrin, none of them worked.  I was finally reduced to searching through the Linux syslog to see if I could find a clue about what the problem was.  I found the following entries in the syslog:

Apr 30 07:53:55 roadie firmware_helper[17195]: main: error loading '/lib/firmware/b43legacy/ucode4.fw' for device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1e.0/0000:02:01.0/0000:03:00.0/ssb1:0/firmware/ssb1:0' with driver '(unknown)'

Apr 30 07:53:55 roadie kernel: [26485.121152] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43legacy/ucode4.fw" not found or load failed.

Apr 30 07:53:55 roadie kernel: [26485.121166] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware (version 3).

Apr 30 07:53:57 roadie NetworkManager: nm_device_802_11_wireless_scan(): (eth1): could not trigger wireless scan: Network is down

These error messages were generated by the Linux kernel during the system boot, but Ubuntu happily finished booting and asked for the userid and password without giving any hint of there being a serious error encountered during the system boot up.  Seems to me not much has changed over the years in *nix systems when errors such as this occur.  Can you imagine some poor user with minimal knowledge of Linux trying to determine what went wrong?   And determining what went wrong is only the first step...determining how to fix it is no walk in the park for those with minimal Linux knowledge.  Unfortunately. it is not as simple as "downloading the correct firmware...."

Fortunately for me, I knew that one could download and install packages from Ubuntu that would fix the problem.  You need to open a terminal window and enter the fllowing at the command line prompts (or, alternatively, use the GUI-oriented Synaptics Package Manger:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

build-essential contains a recommended list of basic packages used when "building" packages such as b43-fwcutter.

b43-fwcutter is a utility for extracting firmware from Broadcom BCM43xx "proprietary" (Windows) driver files and then storing the resulting files in a folder where the Linux kernel can use them to initialize the wireless device at boot time.  You can learn more about b43-fwcutter and what it does here.

So that solved my wireless problem...or so I thought!  The laptop's wireless card initialized and synced up with my Wireless Access Point (WAP), But I still had no connectivity to the Internet.  I could access all my local PCs and local Server, but could not make a connection over the Internet.  I checked the log in the gateway router and noticed that there were error message saying that the router was getting errors when trying to make TCP connections.

It then occurred to me that I had both the wired and tethered interfaces active on the laptop.  I disabled the tethered interface (ifdowm eth0) and that solved the problem.  I now connectivity on both my LAN and the Internet.  Why this solved the problem and why the LAN connectivity with both interfaces active remains a problem to be solved another day...if ever!  The only thing that comes to mind is that for connections over the LAN I use actual IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.1.x), while for Internet connections the ISP's DNS gets involved to do the domain name to address mapping.

And I almost forgot...for the record, my wireless card is a Linksys WPC54G, which was a popular device back in the olden days (aka 2003).  And I guess it still is as Linksys still sells and support them.  I wonder how many potential converts have given up on Linux for their desktop OS because they've experienced problems like this.

Finally here is a link to another person's blog where he describes goinhg through a similar exercise to get his wireless interface working with Ubuntu 8.04.

For the last month or so, I've been working at home for a change.  So my laptop has been on vacation for a while.  I decided today that I had better fire it up and get it online before the queue of pending updates from Microsoft became any longer.  I booted to the Win XP partition and as expected there were about 12 or so critical updates from Microsoft's latest monthly "Patch Tuesday" waiting to have their way with my laptop.  So, I once again let the Microsoft updater run amok and fix all those things it thought was broken.  Once the "Patch-O-Rama" completed, I figured I had better boot up the laptop's alter ego (Ubuntu) to make sure the Linux partition was not too upset from the lack of attention I had been giving it these past few weeks...

Unbuntu loaded and all was well.  I checked a couple of web sites I had recently made some cosmetic changes to in order to make sure they displayed as expected with Linux and Firefox.  And I noticed the "updates available" icon was trying to get my attention.  I checked the updates and to my surprise there were 44 updates available, 22 of which were security updates!

Is this an anomaly or is Ubuntu on a mission to take the world record for patches per month away from Microsoft? ;-)