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

Linux and Mac OS X are now playing nicely

After spending 2 hours of building and configuring Netatalk and Avahi on my Linux box, my wife's MacBook finally managed to browse the files on the Linux machine. All thanks to the guide on sharing directory using AFP at Gentoo-Wiki.

Making Linux and Mac OS X becomes good buddies

Last Friday I helped my wife to get her a MacBook. All the basic setup such as basic networking went pretty well. The hardware performed quite impressively - the only potential problem I foresee to pose a problem would be the heat.

Next would be attempting file sharing with Linux since my wife used and stored my Linux machine before MacBook came. I saw a potential product call Netatalk which look like a good candidate to do just that. May be later tonight or tomorrow night I'll attempt to build Netatalk and play around with it.

Linux Printing with CUPS - sucked into dependency hell

After two days of struggling, I finally got my Epson C67 printer to work again. All in the name of upgrading GIMP-Print to Gutenprint which should provide better support for the printer, especially for photo printing.

The initial build process for Gutenprint was smooth - no error what so ever. But when I tried to print - nothing happen. After much reading and Google around, I found the problem was due to dependency issues. This simply means I had to re-build my Gimp and Ghostscript to newer versions (and also I took the opportunity to re-build CUPS). Only after all those re-built I managed to print again. I just wish there is an easier way to resolve dependency in the future.