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By Brian, November 30, 2007 8:14 pm

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.

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By Brian, November 30, 2007 2:19 pm

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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By Brian, November 29, 2007 1:17 pm

As per yesterdays post, I’ve been working at getting a Ubuntu Linux system running with very particular requirements (detailed in the above referenced article).

First things first was the media – I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO, ran the checksum and copied it to a CD. Next step was to install an empty 60bg drive into the tower and boot from the CD.
Ubuntu 7.10 has a different installation system than most – the CD itself is a Live install, meaning that you actually can boot your computer and get to a usable Linux desktop to play with before installation. Being a past user of Linux, I didn’t spend too much time fiddling with this mode and jumped right into launching the installer. Here’s the beauty of Ubuntu – it did most of the configuration automatically, saving me from the tedious configuration prompts which can be daunting to the new user.

The only custom option I set was giving it carte-blanch on the 60gb drive and told it to leave the other NTFS drives alone, preserving the existing Windows XP environment. Otherwise, it was much like a Windows XP install – set the regional settings, and it hums away doing it’s thing. Actually, since it was a live install – it was a more pleasant experience than Windows XP – never dumping to text-only at any point including partitioning, and it took less time.

First things first – get the PC online and download / install patches and updates released since the CD image was created. This was tricky – I have a USB dongle that handles my wireless network. Checking settings from Windows, I find it runs on the RealTek rtl8187b chipset which after Googling for a while I discovered needed a slightly hacked set of Realtek drivers to get working. Although they worked just fine – I ended up having to disable WPA encryption on the network (not to enthused about that) to actually get a connection. In addition, connecting requires opening a terminal window and issuing two commands as super user to get online – every time I boot up.

After getting online, I configured the apt-get sources (essentially enabled the main ones) and ran the updater. Next step, I installed Wine to allow Windows integration with Linux. The good news? World of Warcraft runs and allowed me to get online. Performance was choppy and the audio stuttered – but it was working.
I installed the kdetv package and was able to start using my WinTV card immediately.
Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop already had a messenger program, and signing into MSN was no issue.
Just for kicks, I tried running Adobe Photoshop CS2 – and it appears to have worked! This actually surprised me, but it seems Wine has improved in leaps and bounds since I last used it. I say that Photoshop appears to have worked, because after loading and looking like it usually does it complained about not being properly licensed, so I will have to install it from scratch instead of just copying it over from the Windows partition.
No luck yet running Civilization, however.

In summary – everything looks quite positive for this set up. Most of what I want the system to do, it is doing, with further tweaking required to get it all operating smoothly. I’m confident I can get the wireless driver up and running automatically at boot up, hopefully with encryption enabled. The TV mode works perfectly already, and assuming I can run the installer – my beloved Photoshop will be available. My games will require some more tweaking, but look promising.

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