Sleep Interrupted

I’ve been a very happy resident of Linux land for a long time now and one of the few gripes I’ve had is the stability of my Netgear MA311 wireless network card. With every new release of Ubuntu it’s got less reliable at connecting and when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 it got really bad, such that often it took four reboots to work and reboots are not something you have to put up with often in Linux.

So, I bit the bullet and bought a new Netgear WG311T, which the nice people at EfficientPC promise will work with Ubuntu. Given that my free time is so precious these days, I find myself much more inclined to buy may way out of problems than ever I was in the past.

With the order placed — which was fulfilled in a very timely and efficient manner — I took a moment to wonder if anyone else out on the intertubes had come across the same problem. A little light googling showed that a few people had issues and it didn’t take long before I came across Jun Sun’s page on how to flash the firmware on the MA311. For the uninitiated, this basically means updating the software that runs on the network card itself. The danger here is that if you get this process wrong you can write off the card.

I had a new card on order, so what was there to loose? I downloaded the appropriate firmware images for the MA311, followed the instructions given on the page and held my breath… Would it work? Would I trash the card?

The network card was still working! Result! I rebooted. It connected first time and continued to work perfectly. I rebooted again and again it connected immediately. Five reboots later and it was still working flawlessly. Years of intermittent behaviour solved in about an hour.

Of course this means I’m now the proud owner of two Netgear wireless network cards but I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to the faster 802.11g networking from the slower 802.11b networking supported by the MA311. I’ve picked up a DG834GT wireless router/modem from eBay for just over £20 and I can now safely pass the old MA311 on to friends or family knowing it won’t cause them any problems.

For anyone else using Ubuntu who is experiencing these problems, the following steps should resolve the problem:

1. Download the PK010101.HEX and SF010802.HEX files from Jun Sun’s collection of firware images into your home folder.
2. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

• sudo apt-get install hostap-utils
• sudo prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 PK010101.HEX SF010802.HEX

I got a little excited about our new computer. You might be wondering why. Well, it replaced our old computer, which was a rather geriatric seven and a half years old! Even I had forgotten that it was that old.

So what does almost four iterations of Moore’s Law give us?

Processor: From a Pentium III 800 MHz to a Core2 Duo 2.2GHz. That’s 2.75 times faster but there are two processors so it could be argued (wrongly) that it’s actually 5.5 times faster. There are much better ways of measuring processor performance but I’m not going to get into that now.

Memory: From 128Mb to 2Gb. That’s 16 times as much and bang on Moore’s prediction! (I did triple the memory to 384Mb on the old machine some years back, it should be noted.)

Disk: From 15Gb to 320Gb. That’s 20 times as much! I find it interesting how disks are growing faster than memory, which is in turn growing faster than processor power.

Graphics: I’m not really clued-up enough to comment on this properly but the on-board memory of the graphics card has risen eightfold from 16Mb to 128Mb. I can, at least, run Google Earth now without the machine grinding to a spectacular halt.

Screen: From a 17″ CRT at 1024×768 to a 22″ flat screen at 1680×1050. That’s 1.3 times as much, linearly speaking. Alternatively, in pixel terms it’s up from 804,864 to 1,764,000, which is 2.2 times as much.

Anything new? A DVD re-writer in place of a CD-ROM drive. Eight USB2 ports, half of which are on the front, instead of two USB1 ports tucked round the back. Headphone and microphone jacks on the front.

Anything missing? A floppy drive, a serial port, a parallel port, a reset button and the sound of a Harrier Jump Jet taking off all the time it’s switched on. Good riddance all. Oh, it didn’t come with Windows, either. I bought this computer from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed instead and saved some money in the process. Now I have a desktop that looks like it comes out of a Hollywood movie. (Although switching some of these effects on does feel a lot light strapping a neon light to the bottom of your car.)

What this adds up to is a very nice to use machine that boots up in half the time of the old one and does surprising things like rip a CD in four minutes without breaking a sweat. The best bit, though, is the price. I got this phenominal set of upgrades in a machine costing 40% less than the old one. Sometimes, modern life is not rubbish.

When I first started this blog I thought I would be writing a lot of technical posts about programming and computing in general but that just hasn’t happened. I think that’s mainly due to the big divide I create between work and home. When I’m home I try (fairly successfully) to forget all about work. I don’t do much programming outside of work these days so when it comes to blogging all the programming thoughts are at the back of my mind. I do engage in computing of the family-tech-support variety, so finally here’s a post dedicated to the subject.

First the fluffy stuff. Lots of people are still stuck with using Windows XP and the default Luna theme looks like it was purchased from an Early Learning Centre. Try finding and installing the Energy Blue theme instead. It’s a lot more restful and manages to calm down the Pimp My Word Doc stylings of Office 2003 to the point where I don’t want to throw up.

My in-laws have just brought a new Lenovo 3000 C200 laptop, which features Windows Vista. Unfortunately it came with so much crap loaded that it ran like a total dog. Rather than try to tame Vista with a meagre half gig of ram or run for cover by installing XP, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.

Everything worked perfectly out of the box apart from the wireless and sound; I never have had much luck with other people’s hardware and Linux. Anyway, a few minutes googling later I came across the solution: For wireless follow these instructions and for sound follow these instructions. Don’t worry if it looks a bit complicated, just enter the commands listed and in 10 minutes everything will be working. This means you can have an operational laptop in around an hour, plus the performance doesn’t suck. Result!

Hopefully future versions of Ubuntu will have these issues resolved and the install or upgrade will be made even easier. If you have a laptop and need help with Ubuntu then I can thoroughly recommend looking for your model on the Laptop Testing Team’s page.

If you’d like to try Ubuntu then one very safe option is Wubi. This is a piece of very clever software that allows you to install a whole other operating system, namely Ubuntu, onto your Windows hard drive without doing anything remotely dangerous or scary sounding like “repartitioning”. When you’re done you can just uninstall like any other Windows application. Amazing!