Over the weekend i blew my home pc away meaning to install XP and Ubuntu side by side. However, i’m only using Ubuntu at the mo, due to the fact that some how when I tried to re-install XP somehow the my USB hard disk got stuffed, so i’m not happy.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, it looks like the partition on the disk has been deleted as I can see the disk in Windows disk management but it wont mount the disk and giving it a drive letter. I blew away the Windows install and put Ubuntu on to see if that could see it any better but nothing. So i’m now looking for something that will hopefully be able to re-build the partition.

Bugger.

Anyway on to the Ubuntu install. The first problem I has was using the default install it kept hanging on what looked like loading the drivers for my graphics card. I started it in the cut down installer and it seamed far happier and completed the install without any other problems.

As it rebooted my display seemed up to scratch, and I heard the startup sound so that meant at least my sound card and vid card were both in working order. Problem was when I logged in my wireless network card wasn’t being listed as a device in the network config.

The first thing I did was check in the Hardware manager to see if it had recognized any hardware at all. It had as you can see below found the hardware, it just did’nt know what to do with it.

Knowing that it had found my hardware i started searching around the newsgroups and came across this page here.

This contained virtually everything I needed to know to get my card up and running.

I had to install the ndiswrapper packages, using the package manager, as below. All the files were on my install cd so I did’nt have to download them.

using this I could then load the windows driver for my card. I then had to create a new entry in my network config file for the interface.

After a reboot I could see the wireless access point using iwconfig command, but I couldn’t get an IP address. I put a static IP address in, but I still couldn’t connect to anything. After a bit more searching I read about people who had a similar problems, and it came down to the encryption being enabled on the wireless access point. I disabled it and hey presto I could get a connection!

So, not ideal but at least I could now get a internet connection.

After all this i am going to blow the pc away again to get XP back on, but Ubuntu will be going back on as well. I will still have to try and get my graphics card working better as all the modes weren’t available and I couldn’t seam to get that 3D desktop Compiz Fusion working ether.

Judging of my experience doing this install I would say that Linux still has a fair way to go before its going to be wildly accepted by the majority of home users. I wasn’t to hard for me to get working, but i suspect the average Joe in the street will go no wear near it if they know they have to hack about with config files to get it working

I’ve decided to join the 21st century, and sign up to a social networking site. I chose facebook for a couple of reasons -

I HATE the navigation and layout of myspace. Lets face it, its awful. And your profile is open to everyone witch I dont like
Most people in the real world I know have Facebook profiles, and dont use anything else.
Facebook just looks nicer and seams to be ‘cooler’ at the mo.
You can write your own apps for Facebook, and that brings me onto my next point.

I’ve decided I want to write an app for Facebook, problem is they seam to want you to use PHP witch I have never touched before. There are unofficial libraries for other platforms, but i’ve decided to take the plunge and try and learn PHP and write the app in that.

And then, i’ve also decided i’m going to write the application under Linux, something i’ve never done before. My pc at home needs re-building so when the latest version of ubuntu (7.10) is released this week i’m going to install that along side Windows XP.

I’ve used Linux in the past, but only when i’ve had to. This is going to be my chance to experement with it from scratch. It will probably take me ages to even get it installed with all my hardware (I want all my stuff working), but i’m sure it will be worth it.

Anything I come across while on my quest to use Linux to develop my app I will of course post on here.

I mentioned a while ago about there being a new version of the Linux firewall OS, Smoothwall. It is currently in beta, but I downloaded it this morning as I needed to put a quick none production use firewall in place.

The current stable release of version 2 wouldn’t install on my test machine (a dell optiplex GX270), but the Beta of version 3 went on no problems. After swapping a network card in the pc that was faulty I could connect to the box.

The new interface is very slick, I like the new navigation system, very easy to find your way round and gives lots of information. All the network usage stats were very cool. You can now also update the snort rules from the browser without an add on. I pointed my browser at its proxy (i’ve never used it as a proxy server before, it runs on port 800) and I could surf no problem.
I couldn’t find out if I could authenticate users on the proxy or not (we have been told we now have to log all internet traffic with a user name against it), but ill pose that question in the forums.

All in all I think the full release should be well worth the wait

There is a new Beta version of the OpenSource, Linux based firewall available now from http://smoothwall.org/.

I’ve been a user of SmoothWall for quite a few years, and this new update looks promising, as its still in beta i’m not really willing to blow my existing firewall away just yet, but ill definitely be upgrading when the production version is released.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Windows Live! writer, I decided to download it today and this post is being written from within it. It does look nicer than the last version, and its support for tags and images is a great improvement. Ill find out in a minute if the formatting stuffs up when I upload it to blogger, that was why I stopped using the last one.