stuff that is shaking

By basd on Jul 26, 2009 | In Welcome, linux, opensuse

1. Following up on my last post regarding importing a public wifi signal onto my own lan, doable. Problem is I need more reception. This lead me to various info on using woks and cantenas. Which hopefully I won't need, but I did go get a Belkin USB Wireless G adapter. It looked hopeful, especially as it has a bit of a wire and then a desktop stand to put the adapter (or really, any usb item) into.

...

There was a downside. No penguin on the box. My retired computer that is to retrieve and feed the wifi connection cannot run Windows, due to some component failure that prevents Windows from loading. It will, however, run Linux just fine.

Just for the record, this is reported as a Belkin F5D7050 revision 4000. It did not initially work, but after a bit of research I looked in the YAST software manager for USB WAN stuff, and found some zd-something-or-other drivers. I had no idea whether this set of drivers would run the Belkin, but I loaded them and sure enough, it works. Some oddities -- if I turn the "hardware" switch off for my internal wifi card, it also shuts off the usb one -- when using NetworkManager. If I turn it on, I get connections on both wifi cards (weird) and I don't know the selection process, but most of the data is being transferred via the new external USB wifi and not the internal card.

I also set it up using the old style "ifup" setup via YAST>Network Devices. This works too (as is necessary to create the connection sharing, since it's apparently not compatible with NetworkManager). But, I can't figure out who to attach to my WPA encrypted router. I have what I think is an ASCII key that works fine in NetworkManager/nm-applet. However, when I try this same key in the YAST>Network Devices>Network Settings, ifconfig and iwconfig report a connection, but I get a non-usable IP address that has no relationship to my actual router DCHP. But YAST is asking for a passkey and not an ASCII key. I think.

Anyway, doesn't matter because I will be importing a public (non-encrypted) wifi connection, which is the whole point, isn't it?

But the whole thing was pretty lucky. My "research" suggested I was going to have to use ndiswrapper, so I was pretty happy when I discovered the more-or-less native firmware for the USB wifi unit.

2. Just got unstable Google Chrome for Linux from this link: http://www.benkevan.com/upload/software/google-chrome-unstable-3.0.195.1-1.x86_64.rpm.

Well, I am very fond of Firefox due to using extremely numerous extensions, so I am not likely to give up Firefox. But I will say Google Chrome is seemingly way faster, especially on Google site stuff such as search, news, GMail and the like. (No, I didn't time it ...) And of course, my Firefox is burdened by numerous addons -- I have never actually determined whether the addons slow things down or not, but seemingly not as far as I can tell except perhaps the initial startup.

3. I have noticed a continuing problem with KDE 4.2 Plasma as I have it set up. It seems to require some semblance of an internet connection and when I don't get one or have wifi wireless problems, or whatever, I crash plasma and can't get it running. However, if I hook up to my eth0 connection, plasma revives. I'm just sayin' ...

4. Ifolders. I wish I had time to experiment with this more!