Picked up Sabrent Wireless-G 802.11G PCI from Amazon. Powered up the computer and I was online. No questions asked. Very pleased.

~$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"cordelia"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:40:F4:FD:AD:48
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=27 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=60/70  Signal level=-50 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

And the content of /etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

~$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:40:ca:49:e2:08
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:18 Base address:0xd800 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:33493 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:33493 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:5041677 (5.0 MB)  TX bytes:5041677 (5.0 MB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:17:9a:4c:a5:11
          inet addr:192.168.1.100  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::217:9aff:fe4c:a511/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:497310 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:162069 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:433115525 (433.1 MB)  TX bytes:16919059 (16.9 MB)

SSH seemed to be the solution, but connecting via Putty from my Windows laptop wasn’t always satisfying. (In the course of my research, I stumbled on a post on how to turn on X11 forwarding in Putty; that’s an experiment for another day.) The old Dell Latitude had an outdated wireless card that didn’t support any modern encryption standards, so I thought I would try the Linksys Wireless-G WPC54GX4 that I ordered some time ago.

A little research told me I would have to go the ndiswrapper route, which filled me with trepidation, especially since I’m running Xubuntu (7.10). However, I found some helpful sources of info:

• wpc45gx linux drivers?
• Wireless card on xubuntu
• The Ubuntu community on ndiswrapper

It wasn’t easy, but I got it working.

With that working I remotely installed Samba, and, with a little more help, got X11 forwarding up and running so I could run the samba shares-admin as a gui.

Next up: Apache and PHP

I just installed Lucid Lynx on a Compaq Presario 6000 that just wasn’t getting it done with Windows XP. It has close to a gig of RAM, but the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ was struggling to keep up with all the antivirus and other bloatware.

Most impressively, Unbuntu 10.04 recognized my D-Link wireless adapter DWA-542 (in answer to this question) right out of the box; no ndiswrapper or any such mumbo jumbo required.

And it looks pretty sharp.

Everything installed fine, but I could get the network to work.

to do a case-insensitive searc for .pm files in /usr and subfolders:
find /usr -iname '*.pm'
To get a terminal type xfce4-terminal in the Alt+F2 box

To find a string of alpha characters between 100 and 200 characters long in finnwake.txt:

grep "[A-Za-z]\{100,200\}" finnwake.txt

To find words between 25 and 30 characters without vowels:

grep -w "[^aeiouy]\{25,30\}" finnwake.txt

to exit a MAN screen, use q

to page down in a MAN screen, use f

to page up in a MAN screen, use b

Apparently there’s an issue running aptitude or synaptic (using Xubuntu Gutsy) on a secured wireless network. It just doesn’t seem to work. I’m sure there’s a fix for it and if I had hours of spare time, I’d find it.

Meanwhile, I took my laptop to a wireless network with a unsecure guest connection and was able to run

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

(Thanks to ubuntugeek for that one) Then I did the same thing for sun-java6-jdk.

Then I used mousepad to write up a standard helloworld.java example. I went to my terminal and did

sudo javac helloworld.java -d /home

Without the -d I had no idea where the class file was going. Without the sudo I got permission errors.

then I ran

java helloworld

and it worked!

Considering the age of the computer and the available memory, the install – once I got the appropriate OS – was pretty painless. The Dell, to which I gave the host name Ophelia, does not have a network card. I ordered a Linksys wireless card from Amazon for $20 with shipping. I’ll be curious to see how that works