Articles tagged technology

After upgrading my Asus Eee PC 901 to Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 I was shocked to find that the wireless card stopped working. Problems included:

• Failing to detect wireless networks
• Random cutouts after connection
• Unstable file transfer
• Very slow download speed (at one point 500 B/sec)

This problem affects all Eee PC models with a rt2860sta wireless card; it is also likely that similar RaLink models are affected, for instance the Eee PC 1000HE among others.

Information about networking capabilities can be found using lspci | grep RaLink* and lsmod | grep rt*.

A working solution

Install the package linux-backports-modules-wireless-maverick-generic using Aptitude. Then run this bash code:

echo "
blacklist rt2800lib
blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2x00usb
" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

This removes the faulty Linux kernel modules and restores wireless connection functionality. According to the forum post below, problems with WEP networks can be solved by adding rt2x00lib and rt2x00pci back in. Look at these sources if you want more information.

Useful sources

• Ubuntu 10.10 on EEE901: Wifi problems fixed here: this single forum post solved all my problems, after a few hours of searching without success
• Arch Linux documentation on Asus Eee PC 901

An occasional pop in the midst of silence, a little crackle while watching a movie — these are features that I did not order with my X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion sound card back in 2008. Creative drivers are appalling and the company is starting to gain notoriety on the internet as just another large company who does not care about its customers. They consistently ignore plees to improve their drivers and blocks enthusiasts from creating improved versions. The driver is broken, please fix it.

Daniel_K, a user on the Creative Forum, is a lone philanthropist who edits the drivers to enable hardware features that Creative Labs that have intentionally crippled. I am about to install Daniel’s support pack and his updated driver from August (after observing the multitude of positive reviews):

1. SB X-Fi Series Support Pack 2.0 (2009-05-15)
2. SB X-Fi Series driver 2.20.0001 - Forte v1.1 (2009-08-06)

Creative do not like Daniel providing its customers with working drivers. Wired investigated and questioned Creative directly:

O’Shaughnessy admits that Creative Labs intentionally crippled its Vista drivers as a business strategy.

My next sound card will not be Creative. The Asus Xonar D2 Sound Card is a viable alternative at a much lower price (half of my Champion Edition) with brilliant reviews all over the internet. Next time I purchase hardware I will ensure customers are satisfied.

Just found an application called ImgBurn after trying for literally an hour to find an Open Source or Freeware application to burn Cue/Bin images. It is a saving grace, and the slightly delapidated website put a huge smile on my face. What a kind guy for doing all this development.

It is brilliant application:

ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats - including BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.

It can burn Audio CD’s from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM - including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.

The burn just finished successfully however the application just played some kind of ridiculous Glockenspiel tune, a characteristic requirement of freeware software. It has performed so far above expectations that I will ignore this minor grievance and rate it triple-A.

When I finally earn back my overdraft this summer I will donate to keep this project going, he only asks for $2.00 after all! I can now finally get on with the finer points of the Computational Mathematics coursework.

I’ve just received Ubuntu “Breezy Badger” by mail at absolutely no cost. It is great that a free software project can offer this: in this way the project can be used by low-bandwidth Internet users or given to friends who would never have considered Linux. I’ve actually written this article using gedit on the Ubuntu Live CD; unlike other distributions Ubuntu has accurately detected my laptop’s wireless card and connected me to the wireless network; it also shows battery usage and the plethora of system information expected from a Linux system.

I am almost tempted to switch to Linux: the only draw-backs would be the lack of software, especially Photoshop and Games, and incompatibilities with friends' machines. Currently I’m trying to print this text document using my Epsom C66 printer; Ubuntu has a lot of Epsom drivers C60—C64 and I hope one of them will work. C60 didn’t work but the C64 driver is printing clearly and correctly. I am really impressed with Ubuntu. Isn’t it awful that Microsoft has such a monopoly over Schools and Businesses: I’m sure things will change soon as Linux takes over.

Interestingly enough, I have just installed Ubuntu onto one of my friend’s old computers. It is going to become a 600 MHz server powering a revision control system, database and web-server. This is not very fast compared to my laptop and my family’s desktop but it is going to be far faster and stabler than my ‘shared’ hosting with 1and1 — there must be hundreds of websites on each one of their shared servers — which probably dedicates approximately 10 MHz to me. As I become more experienced with Linux, I may convert the Ubuntu Gnome-based server to Debian command-line for better performance.