I wrote yesterday about the uninvited house guest we have. Because of this I was doing some general cleaning for sanitary reasons, and to discourage the little critter from hanging around in the basement in general.
Well, the little sneak must have been hiding nearby, as I turned away for a moment, it made a daring dash up the side of the shelf to the rafters and into the corner. I got a good look at it but was unable to do anything about it. By the time I got a chair and flashlight to follow, there was no trace of the rodent or where it had escaped to.
The upside to this encounter is that my cat, Titus, also saw the escaping creature and immediately got very excited. He is now dutifully keeping watch from the top of the shelf it has been running around on. I’m hoping that the fresh scent of cat will make the mouse thing twice about visiting, or that he might actually do his job and catch it! (I have my doubts)
Tomorrow I will have to go to the store and get some traps. Assuming Titus gets bored of his post and vacates the shelving unit, I intend to set up something as documented on this blog – a humane trap which uses gravity to capture the mouse. It might not work, but it’s certainly worth a try in the meantime.
As I’ve mentioned in previous articles (Linux, Ubuntu and Me; Ubuntu, Stage One; and Ubuntu, Stage Two) my network is wireless using a USB dongle that I insist on keeping in the set up.
I have several reasons for this: all my upgrade slots are filled (AGP has video card, PCI has Soundblaster Live! and WinTV cards) and running cables would require a large amount of cat-5 wiring strung across several doorways, ceilings and down a flight of stairs. Ugly, time consuming and annoying to say the least. The current dongle I have works excellent (better than my old PCI card in fact) and came at a decent price.
The catch is that the Linux drivers for the RTL8187 chipset don’t include the B model. It’s functionally compatible, just not recognized by the driver. Lucky for me, someone did some correspondence with RealTek and found out what codes to enter into the driver to correct this. Furthermore they provided him with the source code, allowing him to make the appropriate changes. The source package is freely available for download.
Compiling the drivers was simple – as per RealTek’s README included in the files, the only caveat I encountered was that WPA encryption doesn’t seem to work (WEP 64 and 128 do) and it doesn’t automatically load on startup. I live in the suburbs and can get away with 128 bit encryption, so I can compromise on this point. By adding pre-up /{path to drivers}/wlan0up to /etc/network/interfaces just before the first wlan0 line (iface wlan0 inet dhcp on my system) it works perfectly. I reboot, and it just connects. Voila!
As a footnote, I’d like to mention that all my previous posts on this matter where made on my Windows XP laptop (which has to stay that way since it’s used at / owned by work) but this is the first post made with my newly configured Ubuntu system.
I made some more progress on a few fronts with this system last night. I made a few tweaks to the X11 configuration to enable direct rendering for my Radeon 9200 video card, thus adding a slight performance boost, as well as some edits to the World of Warcraft Config.wtf to boost audio and video performance. The audio still has a minor stutter, but is vastly improved and the frame-rates while outdoors is nearly acceptable – meanwhile it outperforms the Windows environment while indoors which I found interesting.
Further tweaks will need to be made to prevent some artifacts that appear with the UI icons, as well as the overall frame-rate. In order to fix the audio issue, I believe I will need to increase the priority of the Wine process to accommodate the extra layer of software processing required to output to the ALSA drivers. I’m holding out on too many more video modifications until I see what effect this has on overall performance.
Photoshop is at this writing still inoperable. Loading the installer failed to accomplish what I hoped as CS2 is using the Microsoft MSI format – I have since learned that Wine does in fact support this, if I pass the file to msiexec, which I hope to try this evening.
For a kicks, I tried installing a few common programs (that do not use MSI installers) to see the results. MSN Live Messenger installs, loads, and gets properly embedded into the task bar – however, I failed to get it to display the login / contact window thus negating any ability to actually use the program.
iTunes threw several errors and during the installation of the related QuickTime software blacked-out the screen several times. I was able to load and play a wave file through it, albeit the interface was laggy, leaving me to overall determine that Wine is capable of running this – as long as you don’t need iPod support. (I don’t)
My favorite text editor, Crimson editor, installed but fails to operate.
All three of these programs have perfectly usable and nearly identical alternatives on Linux so these where merely tests performed in vain for curiosity’s sake.
On the agenda for this evening is making the wireless network work without dropping to the command line every time I reboot, attempting to run the MSI installer for Photoshop, and increasing the process priority for Wine – particularly while runing World of Warcraft.
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