Things I am forced to do
Figure out linux. Quickly. I got the most important thing (web browser) to work, but I also would like to figure out why I can’t get some Perl modules to install (others work fine) and why some package installations just fail. Also I suspect that my file organisation sucks and I will soon run into problems with it. This is very irritating.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:23 am
System administration under the gun is never fun. What distribution are you installing?
October 12th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Feisty, the latest stable one, with a whole 6 bloody days to go before the new one is out. Not that I have any real need to upgrade, except that it seems to work happier with firefox.
Actually, I reinstalled the entire thing, and now I seem to be having fewer problems with packages (I think I sometimes went to too new a version and it didn’t play well with others?) but still the same problems with Perl. I have not yet tried wireless, because last time I couldn’t even begin to get it to work. Sure, it says WPA “just works”, but not for me. I’ll look at that soon, though, because I hate being tied to the wall.
October 12th, 2007 at 10:01 am
I used to have terrible problems with WPA. But in the most recent versions it was just a matter of adding two lines to /etc/network/interfaces. Make sure wpasupplicant is installed and add lines wpa-ssid foo and wpa-psk bar. There may be a graphical way of doing that.
In principle if you use apt-get things are supposed to work nicely with what’s installed, but sometimes it doesn’t quite work that way, somehow.
A friend of mine once said about Linux: “I asked 4 people and none of them knew how to fix my problem!” Of course all you have to do is to ask the right person.
October 12th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Will that work if I have two wireless networks I connect to regularly, with different SSIDs and different passwords?
WPA_gui seems to be dying some horrible, unnatural death. I found a howto guide, which I will try after a lot more caffeine. I also need to fiddle more with keyboard shortcuts and get my workspaces to show up properly.
On the plus side, I find I remember a lot more than I thought I did.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:17 am
I’ve never tried having two different networks configured that way. Actually at home I just leave the access point open; I figure that this isn’t the US and the MPAA can’t sue us here. (I wish it would be possible to restrict guest bandwidth to 10k/s or something, but oh well). But I suspect that the way to do multiple wireless networks is by editing /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. See /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz. (Do you know about zless?)
October 12th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Well, I could leave my parents’ access point open, because it’s possible that no one can even get our signal. I cannot leave my own open, because I don’t have that much bandwidth I’m allowed to use, and I use most of it myself. I guess I could just restrict mac addresses (which I also do at home, because why not make it very inconvenient for my friends to come over?) but there is a lot of network stealing there, because everyone is all up in each other’s wireless space. In theory the network manager should make it “just work” if I set up two separate locations, but so far, no good.
Through the magic of google, I know now about zless. Useful.
I think I need to bite the bullet and read some references.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I was just thinking the other day of how I haven’t read a HOWTO in years. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s because Linux has gotten completely better: it’s a bit better but there are (obviously) still problems. It’s partly that the documentation is now scattered around in different places.
Another way to make it inconvenient for friends to come over is to live in a 2 1/2. Good news: I’ll be moving in January; bad news: to not-Montreal.
I don’t trust GUI management applications. Maybe I’m just old.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Oh, I am still randomly reading stuff. More now that I had to re-fucking-install the OS, because I am not into making that same mistake again. Not that I’m clear entirely what mistake(s) I made.
I suppose having nowhere for your friends to sit does impede visits, more than making it inconvenient for them to connect to the internet, too.
I assume not-Montreal doesn’t mean something like Westmount?
I trust GUI because they seem less endangered by my typoing. I have yet to try wireless, though.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Three times for installing the OS is the worst. I hope it doesn’t come to that!
There is a dining room table, but of course all of my crap is on the table (like my computer), so it’s not a very usable table. And, no couch (there used to be one, but it didn’t really fit, so now it’s not there anymore). I think couches are key for having friends over. Once, when I moved into an unfurnished place, I realized that actually furniture is pretty useful in general.
Not Westmount. Nope. Westmount would be pretty good. Waterloo actually. It’s not Toronto, at least (?).