Linuxlore

Wireless Ubuntu

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

I’m in the process of trying to get wireless working on one (or both) of my aging laptops with Ubuntu 7.04. Having looked at the documentation it seems to be sadly lacking in anything useful in terms of WPA, although this may well be partly due to the sad lack of proper support in Linux for WPA in general (as in you are very restricted in the cards you can use). That said, I’m not having any more luck with WEP either. Not that a working WEP would help much as I really can’t reconfigure the networks I connect to using WEP just to allow Linux access sadly. I suspect the WEP issue may partly be due to the fact that I’m probably only half heartedly working on it as WPA is the real target.

So, where am I with my selection of cards? Somewhere about here:

(more…)

Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, WEP, wireless, WPA
Posted in Linux | No Comments »

Extra Codecs for Xine on Debian

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

More of a note to self, but I thought I’d blog it since I haven’t for a very long while! Anyway, I finally got around to patching in a few extra codecs into my Debian install the other day and it was surprisingly easy.

• first off I downloaded the file: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20050412.tar.bz2 from the MPlayer site
• next I extracted it and renamed the directory it created to codec
• this new directory was then moved to /usr/lib/
• finally a symlink was created so it also showed as /usr/lib/win32/

Not entirely sure whether working with it symlinked is necessary, or whether simply creating it as win32 would have done. It works OK though, so I’m not really complaining!

So why haven’t I linked the download? Well I’ve just checked it and there’s been an update, so this looks to be the latest version:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20060501.tar.bz2

So I’m downloading that for an update!

Tags: codec, Debian, mplayer, win32, xine
Posted in Linux | No Comments »

Dual screen configuration – first pass

Tuesday, October 11th, 2005

OK, as a first pass at getting my two graphics cards working in a dual head mode I’ve made the following key changes to my XF86Config-4 file. This is by no means exhaustive, but should give a few reference notes to refer to. A HantsLUG wiki entry is planned

First off the Device sections. I had an original one for my NVidia card along these lines:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "NVidia GeForce MX 440"
        Driver          "vesa"
#       Driver          "nv"
#       Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "UseFBDev"              "true"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Note that the two commented out lines are due to switches back and forth with the NVidia drivers. So far the vesa one is the only on that has consistently worked and for my usage is doing me fine for now!

(more…)

Tags: dual head, dual screen, Linux, Matrox, monitor, nVidia, XFree86, XOrg
Posted in Linux | No Comments »