D-Link DWA-110 Wireless G USB Adapter: A Nightmare with Ubuntu

Yes, I bought the D-Link DWA-110 Wireless G USB Adapter and with it I got myself a nightmare - free of charge - when I attempted to get it working with a freshly installed Ubuntu Hardy.

First of all, the driver rt73usb that comes with Ubuntu 8.04 did not work out of the box. A quick browse at the manufacturer site lead me to a driver meant for Linux. Naturally this option would be the preferred one. After all the driver is coming from the maker of the device. Boy, I was totally wrong. Compilation went okay, but I couldn't configure the adapter.

Frustrated, I search for anoother option and I found one - ndiswrapper using the MS Windows driver. It didn't sound like a good solution to me (and it is still not a good one now!). Why would I want to use MS Windows driver? I'm running Linux, for goodness sake! I tried anyway, and as I expected it didn't work.

Another round of researching lead me to a GPL'd driver which in multiple instance reported to work with the exact USB adapter that I have. As a bonus, there's even a guide to the driver running on Ubuntu. Finally, using the open source driver and manual, I managed to get my USB network adapter working. Kudos to all involved with the GPL'd driver and those who contribute to the manual.

wxPython ain't working in Ubuntu Hardy?!!

After upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy, I found out that my wxPython didn't work anymore. A quick check revealed that wx.pth was missing. The fix is just re-create the file and add wx-2.8-gtk2-unicode into it.

Ubuntu Linux, OpenSSH security update and /dev/null

After doing my security update for OpenSSH on my Ubuntu, I found out my /dev/null turned to be an ordinary ASCII file. If you encounter the same problem the fix is simple, just re-create /dev/null to because a character device again.

$ sudo rm /dev/null
$ sudo mknod /dev/null c 1 3
$ sudo chmod 0600 /dev/null

First Attempt to Blog with ScribeFire

This is my first attempt to blog with ScribeFire, a Firefox add-on which helps to post blog.

The extension is pretty impressive. The UI is very intuitive, simple and easy to use, even for newbie.