Installing the Wireless Card Netgear WG311 v3 on Ubuntu 8.04

To install this card, you can find a lot of step-by-step information on this page. However, there is some more tricks to do:

• The drivers of the card have disappeared. Fortunately, you can still find the needed files at this place.
  
  
• On Ubuntu 8.04, to get the wireless network each time you reboot your box, you need to append the ndiswrapper module to the /etc/modules file (need to be root).
  

Install Subversion with Web Access on Ubuntu

For this post, I will just add my feedback on top of this very good tutorial. Here is my no-brainer feedback with Ubuntu Server 7.04 (you can also get this info by reading the comments of the tutorial).

• In the config file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf, you also have to uncomment the #</location> which is located at the very of end of file.
  
  
• The command htpasswd2 is not present but htpasswd seems to do the job also.
  
  
• Your svn repositories that you want to access from the web should read/writable by apache, so don't forget to chown -R www-data:www-data /your_svn_rep.
  
  
• If you don't want anonymous access add this:
  AuthType Basic
  
  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  
  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
  
  Require valid-user
  

Linux on a Dell XPS 1530 Laptop (Ubuntu 7.10)

This report is alive, when something new is working on the laptop, I'll post it here. See other reports there also:

It's the first time I decide to only put a linux distro on a new computer. I mean, no compromise this time, no Windows / Linux dual-boot as usual. Let's try to do everything inside the ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) distribution ! And maybe, later, install a virtualized XP to use photoshop or powerpoint (see the end of the post for an update).

Partitioning. I have never know if it's better to put the swap partition at the beginning or the end of the drive. But anyway, I have created a 4GB swap partition at the beginning of the drive. Followed by a 20 GB / (root) partition. Finally the remaining of the 250 GB hard drive has been allocated to the /home partition. This configuration is very useful when you want to redo a clean install of your linux. Indeed, you'll only need to format the root partition and you don't have to backup your /home directory.

Wifi. Nowadays, it's seems not a problem anymore, it's working out of the box.

Screen. As expected, the brightness controls are working pretty fine. But strangely, every 5 to 10 minutes, the sceen is going back at full contrast. You can tweak the brightness controls in the "System/Preferences/Power Management" menu bar under GNOME to stop it.

GPU, Sound, Touchpad. Working out of the box. Just a side note to get the sound working with the flash plugin in firefox, install the .deb located at this page.

Mic. Not working, neither skype ...

VGA output. By default, it's half working. When you press the "CRT/LCD" button, the screen is only showing on the second screen.

WebCam. Not Working, but is recognized as "OmniVision Technologies, Inc.". Well, now it's working with the cheese program (sudo apt-get install cheese).

Suspend. It suspends but never get back to life.

Hybernate. Working out of the box, even wireless works back !

Finger reader. Not working.

Bluetooth. Seems to work, but no in-depth testing though.

S-Video output, HDMI output. Not tested yet, stay tuned !

To conclude, don't forget to install automatix2 for a no-brainer setup of video codecs, skype, and so on. If you're into OpenGL programming, you have to do a "apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev" to install the proper headers and dependencies.

And if you miss a good'ol WinXP, you can easily virtualize it by installing VirtualBox. There is a good tutorial here. This is only 15 minutes to install XP from an iso image. For a confortable use of WinXP inside Ubuntu, you should load the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso cd-rom image on WinXP to gain seamless windows and mouse pointer (more on this in this post). Then, when you run applications it is surprisingly very fast, indeed, the reiserFS file system beneath should help where NTFS on native XP installation is slow as hell.

Micro-Recipe: Ubuntu Mysql Root Password Restoring

Here are the bare bone commands to restore your mysql root password ->

• /etc/init.d/mysql stop
• /usr/bin/mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &
• mysql -u root mysql
• mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('newpassword') WHERE User='root';
• mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
• mysql> exit;

Testing if it works ->

• /etc/init.d/mysql restart
• mysql -u root -p
• Enter password:
• mysql> You win !

Then add a mysql user with all privileges ->

• mysql -u root -p
• mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'login'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass' WITH GRANT OPTION;
• mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;