Category: My Gentoo

07/06/05

Always use the latest version (2)

As I told before, always use the latest version if you have troubles with some piece of software. Such a stupid mistake made me loose lots of time today and yesterday. I had troubles gettig my wireless card in monitor mode. When your card is in monitor mode, you only recieve packets without sending some, so you can't be seen by other hosts but you can listen to all trafic and detect hosts or access points. This is the setting used by Kismet and other programs to analyse your network. Other modes are Managed and Ad-Hoc.

When I used the command iwconfig eth1 mode monitor at my Gentoo-installation, I always recieved an error message "this mode is not supported" or "illegal operation" or something like that. The strange thing was that the software on the Auditor Security Collection LiveCD worked without any problem. After lots of digging into things like iwpriv, wich has lots of more possibilities, I discovered that I was running an older version of IPW2200 and IPW2200-firmware wich doesn't support monitor mode. The version in the stable branch wasn't the latest available version, I had to use the packet from the unstable branch, wich works fine. So if you also have this problem, just add those two ebuilds to your package.keywords file with the ~x86 keyword, upgrade them and everything should work fine :-D

Permalink . Peter . 19:13:10 . 229 Words . My Gentoo, Siemens . Email . No views

05/27/05

Printing in Linux

Printing in Linux: it doesn't go automatic. Ok, one can say you just have to follow the Gentoo Printing Guide wich is very clear and makes installing a printer very, very easy (just a few commands), but I think we could expect more, especially more automated and integrated in gnome.

First off all, when you have a plain linux installation, gnome and all stuff you need, with no printing devices configured: printing works. You can just print a file without configuring a printer. The big problem is that the printed document doesn't look very good. A plain color is made of textures for example, looks like printing with the first color printers or with kind of colored-grayscales. Off course I want better, so I followed the gentoo guide.

What is it all about? First of all you need to have cups and foomatic installed. No problem, cups should be installed as dependency of gnome and you still can install foomatic if you need it. Maybe CUPS/Gnome could advice you to install foomatic when configuring a printer that has some benefits when having foomatic installed. If you have an HP Deskjet printer, you also need to install the HPIJS driver wich acts like a postscript interpreter between the postscript output and the printer device. Also this one could be recommened when configuring a HP device in CUPS/Gnome. That's all for software requirements. The configuration could be automated more. Normally, you have to create a PPD-file for your printer by hand (just give the model and hardware number to foomatic) or download the right one from linuxprinting.org and place it in the cups directory. I think it must be possible to grep the required information when attaching a printer device with USB. When connecting, gnome should detect the right model, generate the appropriate ppd file and install the printer in cups. Maybe a dialog box should appear informing the user that the printer is added to cups and asking if he/she wants to review the configuration or sharing properties. This would be a real integrated desktop experience.

Permalink . Peter . 02:57:42 . 349 Words . Linux, My Gentoo . Email . No views

05/21/05

Exams are coming, still some projectwork, todo-list

The exams are coming and I still have a lot of projectwork to do. Today, I should have had my last class this year, but the prof sent an e-mail announcing the lesson was cancelled. So, within one week, at the 30th of may, I'll have my first exam. Five to go, from may the 30th till july the first. Well spred in time, so it should be not that heavy, but it's a very long time where I'll see my girlfriend very less :-( I'll miss her :|

But a remaining problem is the amount of projectwork that still has to be done. Today, I finally finished my work for computer graphics. I still have to do some work for Information Theory (very boring statistics), Speech Processing (wich isn't that easy too) and Information Security (wich can be complete soon). So let's hope it doesn't take that much time. We'll see. I hope I can finish information theory and information security tomorrow.

I also have a kind of todo-list with things I want to do with my gentoo when I take a break, after one exam or just after the whole period:

  • Choose a new Gnome-theme
  • Check how I can make wpa_supplicant requesting a new IP when I move from one wlan to another one. Also following point should be taken into account.
  • Write some script for my VPN-tunneling: it should always be started except when I'm registered at the VTK-hotspot, but when I'm not at the students home or at a university hotspot, I only want to get traffic for news.ugent.be and smtp.ugent.be and maybe some internal UGent-websites go through the tunnel. Just a routing script thus.
  • I want to search for a system to detect when my VPN-connection is down. It should be easy if the tunneling device went down too, but that isn't. The only method I know for now, is sending pings to some server and inspect the packet loss. There has to be a better, quicker and less consuming method. I'm using vpnc, so if you know a sollution, you're very welcome to leave a message ;-)
  • Find out why my x-server crashes when I'm using my two synaptics-things at the same time. I have a touchpad and some little thing between the g and h button to move my cursor. When I'm using the two together, sometimes my X crashes.
  • I want to find out why my USB-mouse doesn't work when X is allready running while I attach the device. Now I always have to restart X. Must be some simple problem.
  • Now I have the weather-applet in my panel, giving me the current weather situation, but I also want a forecast.
  • I want to get the internal smart-card reader working. I have such a thing built into my computer (Dell D810) and want to experiment a little with the new Belgian electronic identity card aka eID. I also want to test some bank-functions like reloading my proton and so on. I just want to play with it :-)
  • Make software suspend and hibernate working. Ubuntu Linux configures this automaticly, see this installation report. That last one is also an interesting one for D810 users who want to install linux on their machine ;-) It seems more people are buying a D810 or D800 so the counter of installation reports increases.
  • Follow the Gentoo on Laptops Guide

I'm sure the above list is far from complete. Suggestions can always be made ;-)

a Belgian eID card
A Belgian eID card

Oh, before I forget. Yesterday, I registered the domain peterdedecker.net to create a personal homepage where I can give some information about myself, put my CV online, maybe move this blog to, place some documents about student representation, learn some webdesign,... Again, suggestions are very welcome. If it's a page about me, I'ld like to have this blog there. Not that I dislike this place, au contraire, but on a personal website, the minimum requirement today is a weblog. I don't know wich engine to use: I like b2evolution and its good spam-protection a lot, but as Ikke allready told, development is like stalled. It seems WordPress and Nucleus are very nice ones. It's also a little bit easier because I don't have to worry about multiple blogs hosting, but I sure want to convert this blog to the new engine (if so). If you have some experiences in moving blogs or using other engines, feel free to comment.

Goodnight!

Permalink . Peter . 01:46:29 . 744 Words . Life & Fun, My Gentoo, Studies, Internet & Blogs . Email . No views

05/18/05

cannot map sys bios

Yesterday, I placed gnome and all dependencies in my packages.keywords (with the ~x86 keyword of course) so I could install gnome 2.10. Worked fine, but when I booted a few hours later, my X-server couldn't start. Normally there should be no correlation between these two facts, but it's the only thing that changed between a working and a non-workig X. This is the error I recieve:
(EE) RADEON(0): Cannot map SYS BIOS

Ikke was here yesterday night, but he couldn't fix it too. He tried with vesa, some modules and xorg.conf from a working ubuntu liveCD, but all without any effect. We also recompiled xorg, but this also wasn't the solution.

If you know any, please let me know! If I find it, I'll sure post the solution here.

You can find a more detailed error log here and my xorg.conf file here. Yesterday I worked graphical till 18 hours (I don't know when I restarted my X then), but it didn't work after I booted up at 0.30 am this morning. The packages I emerged yesterday can be found in my genlop log.

Permalink . Peter . 09:19:55 . 184 Words . My Gentoo . Email . No views

05/15/05

Networking troubles

Never buy D-Link, it sucks ;-) Configuring is hell and when you backup the configuration and want to restore it after a firmware upgrade, it won't work. Stupid thing. And now suddenly, linux clients can't connect to the wireless D-Link AP. Big trouble, spent few hours to find out. When I tried to connect, the init-script tells me it's connected to the AP, but can't recieve an IP from DHCP. Now I fixed the whole bitch and upgraded security from WEP to WPA.

First of all: despite of the positive comment of Rohan, ifplugd didn't work for me on the wired interface. When I plugged in the network cable, the deamon did nothing. When I manually brought up the interface, ifplugd took it down. Stopping ifplugd and bringing up the interface again worked of course. Rohan, did you have good experiences with ifplugd? Maybe my configuration of ifup/ifdown is wrong, but I don't think so. If you have some ideas, please leave a comment.

As I previously told, I gave wpa_supplicant a try today. There's no much online documentation available for it, but everything is explained very well in the example configuration file. Seems that piece of software has very much capabilities! I configured the AP to use WPA-PSK and modified my wpa_supplicant.conf to that. This is the configuration:
network={
ssid="my_essid"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk="my very secure password"
priority=2
}

Don't forget, if you have an Intel Pro WLAN card (IPW 2100 or 2200) to uncomment the line ARGS_eth1="-Dipw" in your /etc/conf.d/wpa_supplicant file or modify it to the driver you use. I also commented everything out in /etc/conf.d/wireless. Don't forget this step, because /etc/init.d/net.eth1 (or your other interface) and /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant would fight :-) After stopping all network stuff and starting wpa_supplicant, it seemed wpa_supplicant found the wlan but didn't request an IP. After a dhcpcd, everything worked just fine. Of course, first I had to find out some things, like I had to use the group-option and so on, before it worked. Now I just have to find a way to make wpa_supplicant or some other script requesting an IP when I bring up the device or when I start the service.

Conclusion: wpa_supplicant seems to be a very nice piece of software. I think its functionality or the use of it should be integrated in the gnome network configuration tool to make linux more user friendly for mobile users. I don't know why it isn't now. It's not fine for starting users to read the whole sample configuration and all that technical stuff: they just want to fill in some WEP-key or WPA-password (or eventually a username/password or so on).

Permalink . Peter . 16:58:12 . 475 Words . My Gentoo . Email . No views

<< Previous Page :: Next Page >>