0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01) for Hardy Heron

Since most of my hits are from the ubuntu forums threads where I explain how to make this card work, I’m going to post the full explanation here. So simple it would just be copy paste.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

Now restart… presto! Your broadcom card should be working, if not, just let me know.

BTW, I haven’t forgotten about qemupuppy and dsl, those posts are coming soon.

Slax 6 USB

As promised in my previous post, here’s my review on Slax 6.

First of all I should say that I love Slackware. Slackware 7.1 was [almost] my first Lignux distro (I test drove Phat Linux [0] before installing Slackware 7.1).

Trying Slax was like meeting an old friend from childhood: things were different but it was fun nonetheless.

The first thing I loved about Slax was the modularity: you can download modules and make them start when you start Slax. The only problem is that there aren’t many modules available for Slax 6 yet.

The “installation” of Slax 6 is really easy, you just download a 190mb tar file, which you untar in your pendrive and then just run a script to make your pendrive bootable. As simple as that.

Slax recognized my Internets (ethernet, not wifi, of course… I have a broadcom…) but it didn’t recognize my sound card (which will be a constant in all the other USB Lignux I tried so far).

Slax can be either run from the pendrive itself or loaded into the ram which makes things go faster.

One of the things that called my attention is that Slax doesn’t come with an IRC app (well, Kopete doesn’t count as an IRC app for me). I had to compile Konversation from source for that.

I also compiled Yakuake and Katapult (I can’t live without those). I failed to install Python 2.5.2 (I didn’t try too hard, though).

My opinion is that Slax is a great mini distro. If you never used Slackware or Slackware based distros before this might be an oportunity to test drive one without much hassle, just don’t expect things to be as easy as apt.

You can find screenshots on their site [1]. The wallpaper is simple, yet impressive.

My next two posts will be about qemupuppy (a short one, since I didn’t like it much) and Damn Small Linux.

[0] Phat Linux hasn’t been updated since the year 2002 and you can’t even download it because there are no available mirrors, but here’s a link to their page for those of you that want to know what Phat Linux was: http://phatlinux.com/

[1] http://www.slax.org

Ututo XS 2006 Vivo

I have recently been testing some Lignux distros: it’s not that I’m not happy with Kubuntu it’s just that I want a distro where I’m in more control of the contents installed and since I consider myself a kind of Lignux power user (keywords: “kind of”) I don’t think I really need ‘Linux for Human Beings’.
(Just to be fair, I’m not saying Kubuntu is bad, I’m saying that Kubuntu usually just ends up being Ubuntu’s ugly stepsister).

The lack of more interest on Kubuntu from the developers and the need for a distro that gave me more control made me decide to start trying new distros. It is weird that after so many years of being a Lignux user I only tested 2 distros: Slackware and Kubuntu.

So the first distro I decided to test was Ututo.
Ututo, a small lizard that lives in Salta, Argentina, gave its name to the Ututo project. From the Ututo project came the Ututo GNU/Linux distribution which, to this date, is one of the few that follows the 4 rules of software freedom by RMS.

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Stallman said in an interview:

All of the commercial distributors of the GNU/Linux system going back something like 7 or 8 years, have made a practise of including non free software in their distributions, and this is something I have been trying to push against in various ways, without much success. But, in fact, even the non commercial distributors of the GNU plus Linux operating system have been including and distributing non free software, and the sad thing was, that of all the many distributions, until recently there was none, that I could recommend. Now I know of one, that I can recommend, its called “Ututo-e”, it comes from Argentina. I hope that very soon I will be able to recommend another.

[This interview is a little old, now there's also gNewSense which is free according to the 4 freedoms.]

Stallman’s support for Ututo is so that Ututo’s ISOs are hosted by FSF.

Ututo comes compiled for many architectures, which makes it faster for most computers. It comes with a choice of KDE, Gnome, IceWM, or Fluxbox and it has Beryl too :S It has its own package manager (uget) and the repos do __not__ include any privative software.

Now, what I tried was the Live CD from 2006 not the latest installable version (2007) and the 2006 Live CD comes with Gnome and IceWM. So, in case you were wondering… yes, I have been using Gnome for a while (but if I decide to install Ututo I will install KDE, of course).

I should also point out that Ututo was one of the first distros to produce a working live cd, something that was seemingly impossible at the moment.

Overall I really enjoyed the Ututo experience and I like that it provides the freedom that all the other distros lack. And who needs Flash anyway? Gnash won’t let me watch YouTube videos, but I don’t really care, I can download the FLV and watch the videos with my media player of choice.

Here’s link to a screenshot of the Ututo XS 2006 Vivo. To find out more about the Ututo project (which includes much more than just the GNU/Linux distro) you can visit their website [0].

My next post will be about my return to Slackware… with SLAX on a Live Pendrive.

[0] https://www.ututo.org/www/?country=ENGLISH

ooxml, the April fools’ standard

I was reading /. to find out those juicy April Fools’ news and I read this article [0] that says that ooxml was approved by ISO. I wasn’t 100% sure it was just /. trying to be funny, but I didn’t believe it at first. Then I read another article in KDE Dot News [1] saying that KDE had voted “yes” on ooxml after receiving an anonimous donation. That allowed me to breath again: the ooxml article in /. __had__ to be a joke!

Well, I woke up this morning to face the sad reality: ooxml had, indeed, been approved by ISO.

I read the official ISO press release [2], I read the report article that appeared in nooxml [3] which called ooxml the banana standard and had nice logos that say ‘MISOSOFT’ and ‘ISO, A division of Microsoft’ (I would put the images here, but I try to adhere as much as I can to the semi-official, semi-serious ascii ribbon campaign against gratuitous graphics on the web [4]).

I even read the comment by Idiot de Icaza on his personal weblog [5] where he acclaimed ooxml (not surprising, after he called it a “superb format” [6]).

Some people would say that ooxml turning into a standard doesn’t change anything for free software, but it does. ISO and all its standards have been discredited: if we complain about this new standard then we lose, because then all of our standards mean nothing (ODF); if we don’t complain, then we lose, because ooxml has no opposition.

I wish I could use ODF at all times, but I still have to exchange documents with people that don’t even know what ODF is and since M$ Office doesn’t work with ODF, I’m forced to save as .doc (which I hate doing, not only because I hate .doc, but also because I don’t like OO.o a whole lot; I’m a KDE guy, I’m all about KOffice).

So, yeah, ooxml is a standard now, even after all the corruption involved in its voting. The Free Software lovers should start a bigger campaign to promote OO.o, along with Sun, then people may not even use ooxml, regardless of its standarization.

[0] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/01/2229207
[1] http://dot.kde.org/1207000153/
[2] http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1123
[3] http://www.noooxml.org/
[4] http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~ghelman/ascii.html
[5] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Apr-02.html
[6] http://groups.google.com/group/tiraniaorg-blog-comments/browse_thread/thread/2a07b8b50038d8c8/d582162af2d63d57

Jamendo will charge for their music

After the major failure with their new “orange” layout (that still doesn’t work with Konqueror), Jamendo has surprised the free software community and freedom fighters by issueing a press release stating that they are going to start charging 20 amerikan dollars per album downloaded.

One of their admins said: “We tried to make people donate to keep this service free, but we are not Radiohead and we can’t even make enough money to maintain our severs”.

EDIT: just look at the date

Exit Gutsy, Enter Hardy II

Installation is complete.
I ran into some problems.

0) The wifi driver was broken. I have a broadcom (0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)) and they changed the bcm43xx driver (it was deprecated) for the b43 driver. The installation went wrong somewhere and the driver wasn’t working. The solution was to use b43-fwcutter (I compiled, but I’m pretty sure it is in the repos) and then this:

EDIT: wordpress seems to be messing up the aligment, I will fix this later, check out the solution on the original site [0] for now:

export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

This creates another small problem: my wireless device was eth1, but after this eth1 was useless and instead I had to use wlan0_rename. I corrected this behaviour following the solution I found here [1]:

1. go to /etc/udev/rules.d
2. sudo nano 70-persistent-net.rules
3. comment out the line
# PCI device 0×14e4:0×4318 (bcm43xx)
# SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTRS{address}==”00:0e:9b:bf:af:f4″, NAME=”eth1″ <this line
4. save, exit back to terminal
5. sudo rmmod b43
6. sudo modprobe b43
7. udev will add a line like this to the aforementioned file:
# PCI device 0×14e4:0×4318 (b43-pci-bridge)
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:0e:9b:bf:af:f4″, ATTR{type}==”1″, NAME=”wlan0″

Now the Network Manager shows the wlan0 interface correctly as wireless adaptor.

That got my wireless connection working again. The only weird thing is that I have a useless wmaster0 device now…

1) For some reason whenever I tried to sudo I got a “unable to resolve host” sign. I had to correct a problem with /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname
My /etc/hostname now has this one line (one word actually) it says “MyPrecious” (no quotations marks, of course). That’s my lappy’s name ^_^
My /etc/hosts file has this as its first line: “127.0.0.1 localhost MyPrecious” (again, no quotation marks). Everything’s solved, I can sudo and have a nice name for my comp at the same time
The best way to solve this (without having to use sudo, that is) is through the recovery mode or with a live cd.

2) Kicker seems to freeze when kde loads, but I don’t remember if this happened right after hardy or after I installed some apps (Knemo). I just kill kicker and reload it for now. EDIT: this seems to be fglrx related, go figure…

3) This is serious business. I have an ATI card, x1400 mobility… I’m using the privative drivers the open ones weren’t working for me when I started with Kubuntu, during Feisty, and I never gave them another try. The thing is that for some reason I can’t close my laptop’s lid, otherwise everything freezes. I’m still looking for a solution for this one.

EDIT 0: most of my games are segfaulting and I still can’t fix the lid problem. I’m pretty pissed at AMD right now. We need __better__ drivers.

EDIT 1: games aren’t segfaulting anymore and I got fglrx running again (and I’m able to close the lid). I don’t know what solved it since I tried a gazillion different things. We __still__ need better drivers (free ones would be definitely better).

[0] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/202575

Exit Gutsy, Enter Hardy

I’m a happy user of Lignux Kubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, who decided to upgrade to the beta version of 8.04 Hardy Heron.
Here are my views on the upgrade process:

0) My KDE is in Spanish, so I find it weird when I get something like this:

Se van a desinstalar 76 paquetes. Se van a instalar 179 paquetes nuevos. Se van a actualizar 1695 paquetes. Debe descargar un total de 2287M. This download will take about 14 horas 12 minutos with your connection. Fetchin and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

Why do you get such a mixture of languages?

1) The message said the download would take 14 hours and 12 minutes, but the progress bar has an estimated time and it hasn’t gone over 6 hours so far, so where does that 14 hour estimate come from?

I’ll continue with my comments after the download is done… in 6 or 14 hours…

EDIT 0: I left and when I came back Xorg was using 99% of processor power and nothing was responding, I had to restart (probably a full restart wasn’t necessary, just X, but I decided to test some grub things too). After booting I ran kdesudo “adept_manager –dist-upgrade-devel” again and it downloaded a couple of things more and now it is in the “Downloading and installing upgrades” phase.

EDIT 1: Pre-installing took a while longer than expected since I have automatic bug report retrieval (and Hardy still has many bugs, so the bug retrieval took some extra time). The estimated time for upgrade completion is 50 minutes.

Hello, world!

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Mar 7 2008, 04:10:12)
[GCC 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> print “Hello, world!”
Hello, world!
>>>