The Management

So the demise of Belladonna hasn't had too great a negative impact. I seem to have been able to rescue all (?) of my data onto my external hard drive and my tablet PC skedge suffices for all my needs. However, in quite a few ways, I don't feel comfortable making Skedge my primary system yet. Consequently, a lot of things I used to have set-up aren't. For example, encryption for Pidgin. I am setting that up now, but I've let things go for a while without. My finances are in limbo, in that I haven't updated my budget (and due to a certain sublettee). A dozen desktop customisations that I miss remain missing. I don't even have half of the scripts I used to use so frequently. School puts everything on pause, it feels :| Changes I'm thinking about is to start using public key encryption more, employ content versioning for my /etc, ~/.gnome2 and other configuration directories, get a server running near constantly, etc.

Ubuntu Unwired

So, quite a few posts of mine are meant to be instructive to my future self, recording how I manage something so that I won't have to stumble through it again. Letting these be public here might allow the odd other person to benefit from my experience.

So, a Netgear MA111 wireless USB adapter. I wanted to get one working with my Acer Travelmate, Skedge. Sadly, the MA111 only supports WEP. So does my travelmate, but Linux doesn't seem to support its hot-swapping between Wireless and Wired. I have to set that at boot while the BIOS is in control, so I'd have to reboot to change the setting. Fortunately, the main environment I want to use this wirelessly in is on campus, and that doesn't employ WEP or WPA. (Crazy kids.) They only require authentication before your packets will be routed. Yay.

Anyway, the point of this post is to record what small change I had to made to have this work in Ubuntu. This forum thread discusses a few different methods, including "download the source and build it yourself". I'm getting bored with doing that, so instead I went to packages.ubuntu.com and searched for the module I needed, prism2_usb.ko. Results. I then apt-get'd the one for my kernel (i386), let it install, and yay, workingness.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I did also install linux-wlanctl-ng through apt-get and ran the following two commands from the forum thread.

$ sudo modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1
$ sudo wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable