Time for a break

Christmas is over for another year. I had quite some fun this time around, and got some well-thought out gifts, as well as giving some

Work is out until the 3rd of January, so to enjoy my break, Kat and I are heading to Coffs Harbour till the 30th.

Nyssa and I had a little scrap over which car we could scab from our parents, as she is going to Byron, and neither of us wanted to use our own cars. Fortunately for me, she and her friends are camping, while I’m only hotelling. She got the 4WD, while I got the Mazda 6. Should be a pleasant trip up.

Except for the 4am start, if I want to beat the Boxing Day traffic on the freeway.

Somehow I got my wireless card working

And I really stress somehow.

My head was almost flattened from the proverbial brick wall, when suddenly I was connected to my router, through my D-Link DWL G510. This wasn’t my first choice of wireless card, but I was getting desparate and sick of using a ethernet cable through the apartment. I really should have researched before buying.

Getting it working was a drama, and I’m going to have to try doing it again on some fresh installs of Ubuntu/Xubuntu, or I will never be sure how I got it working. Windows was no better, but that’s another story altogether.

First stop was the Ubuntu Community Documentation (Wiki) for info on the Wireless cards. According to the Wireless Cards Supported page, my adapter should be using the RT61 drivers.

The instructions for the RT61 drivers were pretty straightforward. I was able to compile them without any problems.

Except that the card didn’t work after that.

I also found this great page in the documentation; Wireless Trouble Shooting Guide. There is a wealth of information and commands that can be used to determine the status f your card.

I could see the ra0 interface when I used the command iwconfig, yet it wasn’t getting an IP address. I tried turning of the Router WPA key, installing WiFi Radar,
GTK-WiFi, which look like great tools to have. But all no avail …

… until suddenly it just worked. Which is great, but I really want to know what I have to do to make it work next time, without going through hours of installing/uninstalling, re-configurating, etc.

I blog about Xubuntu

I was sifting through my feeds last night, when I read a post on the Ubuntu Blog. ubuntonista has asked people that blog about Ubuntu to write a post and pingback his original one.

I happen to I think this is a great idea; I’m always interested to read what other people think of Ubuntu, and what they try to do with it. This is such a simple way to compile a list of people who do this.

Check out the comments for some good Ubuntu blogs!

I’m looking forward to seeing a link page too.

A New Start

I made the big move to Kayee’s apartment on the weekend.

I spent most of Friday afternoon/evening/night packing as much of my stuff as I could. I was originally planning to a bit Friday and the rest Saturday, but as it turned out; I didn’t actually have that much stuff. Apart from my clothes and computer, I filled five 40×80x20 tubs of stuff. I’m sure I could throw out a good proportion of that too.

The folks were a bit sad about the whole thing, but I think Dad was worst. Mum was happy that I felt it was time to move out. She thinks that it reflects well on them, besides which she thinks it will help me to really grow up to have to take care of myself completely. Dad kept trying to talk me out of it. It was a bit sad, but I’m only 15-20 mins away, and in the last year or so I was hardly ever home anyway. When I was, I was watching DVDs or mucking around on my PC.

My room is quite small, but I think I can live with it. Everything is compact, and all my stuff fits nicely under my bed. I spent quite a bit of time setting up my PC and arranging all the cables, so it’s quite tidy now. We also took the old sofa bed from my parents which fits quite nicely in the living space. With a Christmas tree and some lights, it looks much more like a home that it did before.

I’ve already got a growing list of things I want to do around the place to make it nicer, and I can already sense that making time for it will not be easy.

I think this will definitely test me.

Latest ramblings

Not much new on the Xubuntu front I am afraid to say at the moment. My life is in a bit of an upheaval, and will probably stay that way until the new year.

We had our work Christmas party last Friday, which was quite a nice night. A lot bigger this year than last year, which in turn was bigger than the year before, with 70 guests (we know have over 20 staff, compared with 12 last year, and 7 the year before). We ate and stayed at the Sebel hotel in the city, right under the bridge at Pier 1.

Spent all of the Friday morning assembling our exhaust fan prototype to display on the evening. It was a mad rush, and some bits were assembled quite haphazardly. It was annoying that in the end the display was hardly even noticed or used. I could have spent those hours writing some more VB.NET code.

Still we had an awesome seafood buffet and plenty of booze available. I even ‘borrowed’ one of the GPS units, that our service electricians use. Kat and I had plenty of fun using ‘Jason’ to direct us all over the city.

The rest of the weekend was spent assembling furniture for my new room. It’s starting to really look like an IKEA showroom now. I got a bed frame, work desk, wardrobe and chest of drawers. My hands are quite blistered from all the assembling. I should have ‘borrowed’ a power drill set from work too.

I’m planning to be moved out of the house by the weekend, all I really need to do is sort out my clothes and general crap, then finally move my computer … All I really need to do, is putting it quite blithely, it’s gonna be quite some task.

Hopefully all will go well. And I definitely have a Xubuntu project on the horizon; getting my wireless ethernet card to work.