NetGear WG511v2 wlan card on Ubuntu Edgy

I am at my parents home in Glashütte at the moment. They have T-DSL (the Call & Surf Comfort package from T-Com Germany), but it was not working completely for one or the other reason…

So, since “I am a specialist in configuring T-DSL”, I spent yesterday morning with setting up the router and this morning with placing the router at a place where it is better accessible from clients. As a result, my parents (as well as me and my brothers ;-) have WLAN access at home now. The connection is made through the WLAN router that is part of the standard package and Computers can use the (of course encoded) hotspot.

Since I will have this in our new flat as well, I bought a PCMCIA WLAN card from NetGear yesterday. It’s the WG511v2 model, supporting 802.11b/g. I thought it is no problem to get this work on Ubuntu, but it turned out to be not quite straight forward. Some German blogs gave me hints on how to install it, and I will go for a short instruction for (non-German-speaking) people who are in the same situation as I…

NetGear WG511v2 PCMCIA WLAN card on Ubuntu Edgy:

First, check whether the model was identified correctly – in a shell type sudo lspci. The output should contain this line: 0000:06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88w8335 [Libertas] 802.11b/g Wireless (rev 03). This means, that the card is correctly identified.

Now, it’s time to install some packages. Get a connection (LAN, modem) and install the packages wireless-tools and ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. For the latter, the version is very important! ndiswrapper-utils comes with the versions 1.1 and 1.8 on Ubuntu Edgy – and by default the 1.1 is installed. This version does not work, you will need 1.8! You can install the packages via apt on the shell: sudo apt-get install wireless-tools ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. As usual, dependencies are resolved automatically.

When the packages are present, you need to convert the Windows2000 driver (the .inf file) with ndiswrapper and install it. I didn’t figure out what ndiswrapper is all about, but it somehow converts .inf driver files to another format and thus makes the card working on the linux kernel. First, put the installation CD that came with the card into your CDROM drive and mount it. It’s usually mounted on /media/cdrom/ automatically. On the shell, cd into /media/cdrom/Driver/Windows\ 2000, that’s the place where the WG511v2.INF file lives. Then type sudo ndiswrapper -i WG511v2.INF to install the driver. It’s important to do this in the CD directory rather than copying the file anywhere else. The ndiswrapper tool seems to need other files from this directory as well… that’s a pitfall I tapped into ;-). You can now type ndiswrapper -l, to check whether everything is right. The output should look like this:

Installed drivers:
wg511v2 driver installed, hardware present

Load the module ndiswrapper into the kernel: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper. If everything is ok, you should see the green LED blink – the card is installed. You can proceed to configure the card with System->Administration->Networks or manually via an entry in /etc/network/interfaces. The card appears as wlan0 interface.

Tclkick 8.4.14 builts

I have made fresh builts of Tclkick 8.4 – containing 8.4.14 of Tcl and Tk. Also, the package load behaviour of Thread is altered in these builts: you can now load the Thread extension (which is at the recent version 0.6.5) via package require Thread. So, there is no need to distinguish between startup through tclkick or a “normal” Tcl distribution in your scripts anymore…

Therefore I won’t support Tclkick8.5a4 anymore. In Tclkick 8.5, the tcl is frequently updated from the official CVS and this will be the case for Tk as well as soon as tile is merged in completely and Tloona works with this merged tile. In between, the Tcl CVS version has proven to work very well and can be tested through the tclkick8.5.

In other words, when you want to download Tclkick: Go here and

• expect a rock solid and stable 8.4.14
• expect a beta quality but “good for everyday work” 8.5a6

As usual, Tloona works with both these kits. There is only one problem I recognized today and this is on windows XP, if you have the classic theme running instead of the modern one(*) and tclkick85 (only 8.5). If you resize the Window, there will be a crash “Cannot alloc blablah memory” from time to time. I have no idea where this comes from – although I suspect tile – but it does not happen if you use Tloona with Tclkick 8.4 or if you use the modern XP theme (e.g. the blue one) and not the classic one. Funny thing, but well… maybe it is related to the tile->Tk merge and gets fixed before Tcl/Tk 8.5 is released.

* whether or not this theme is soo modern is another question, but they call it “modern”

Useful Applications: StickyNotes, Kmeleon

One of the (at least from me) underestimated desktop applications are those small sticky notes applications. They come in several flavours on several operating systems. On Ubuntu for instance, you get the sticky notes by right click on a panel and them choose “sticky notes” from the selector (“Klebezettel” in german). You can then add notes by double click on the new tray icon and write whatever you want – ideas, grocery list, TODO items you dont want to miss, appointments… The note then stays in foreground on your desktop and is visible until you hide it explicitely or delete it. This is very helpful for managing sorts of small information you would forget otherwise… normally you’d pin it as real sticky note elsewhere, but if you look at a computer screen anyway, you can do it there as well.

For windows, there is a small tray application called magic notes. Basically it’s the same as the sticky notes on Gnome. Other OS and window managers will have the same thing, I am sure.

Another thing I discovered today is Kmeleon. It is a Gecko (Mozilla) based browser but built on the windows API and very lightweight and also very fast. I was really surprised that the speed of Firefox can be topped, but obviously it is possible. It’s now my standard browser on windows systems. Unfortunately, the installer did not work as of today and I needed to download the 7zip files. A strange zip format that can not be opened with winzip – you have to download the 7zip program from here as well. After (the slight torture of) unzipping the Kmeleon archive, you can place the result directory k-meleon under program files or wherever you want, and run the setdefault.exe program inside. This sets up the links in the Programs menu and some registry entries, it can also make Kmeleon the default browser. Kmeleon comes with a very good performance and very less memory consumption. This is good. I’ll try it for a while and see whether I miss something from Firefox. If not, I will stick with Kmeleon. Since it is Gecko based, it displays all the sites that Firefox does display as well.

Ubuntu Edgy & compiz

Lately I installed Ubuntu Edgy on the remaining 50GB of my new hard drive. Very nice!

It boots from the live CD and presents you what you’ll get. Then, you can install it directly from the running live CD. With every release they make it better – even when you think it can’t be better. After a very smooth and uncomplicated installation process you get a fresh Gnome 2.16 and lots of good feeling Linux desktop. Linux and Bricolage? That was yesterday… what you get with Ubuntu is highly professional ;-).

And, last but not least I heard about compiz, the new 3D GL desktop developed by SuSE (or Novel?). There is a tutorial like intro for installing that on Ubuntu Edgy here… so I thought, just try it. Installation went smooth, and – wow! Wobbling transparent windows and menus when you move them, a cube like animation when you switch the desktop – that’s really cool. Windows Vista has this as well, but people keep telling that it is not better there, but therefore more expensive. For anyone who likes to have a nice GL desktop, today and for free: try Ubuntu ;-)!