linux.gen.nz

Over the last few months I’ve been trawling Trademe for bits of Cisco kit to build a CCNA practice network – most recently, a 2600 router, 3640 router and external DC power supply.  Unfortunately the package was too heavy for NZ Post to carry, so the seller shipped it with Peter Baker Transport.

The box with the gear in it arrived a couple of days later.  Despite several layers of bubble wrap and bunched up newspaper, PBT had done their best to cause as much damage as possible.  The photos tell it better than I can:

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About 6 months ago, I replaced my Vodafone 3G PCMCIA card with a Sierra Wireless 597 USB EVDO modem (branded by Telecom New Zealand as ‘T-Stick’).  Unfortunately there’s a bit more inside it than just a USB modem – the manufacturers also decided to cram in a Micro-SD reader and a pretend CD Rom drive with the software for the device on it.  The first time you plug it into a Windows PC, the cdrom appears, its autorun fires off the software installer and the driver gets installed.  Then, when you remove and reattach it to your PC, the modem gets detected and you’re able to get online.

Plugging it into the laptop running OpenSolaris, the MicroSD reader and CDRom device were detected by the kernel and appeared in Gnome’s file manager without any issues, however there was no sign of the serial device:

Jan 28 14:09:13 pkunk usba: [ID 912658 kern.info] USB 1.10 device (usb1199,fff) operating at full speed (USB 1.x) on USB 1.10 root hub: storage@2, scsa2usb2 at bus address 3
Jan 28 14:09:13 pkunk usba: [ID 349649 kern.info] Sierra Wireless USB MMC Storage SWOC22905731
Jan 28 14:09:13 pkunk genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] scsa2usb2 is /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2
Jan 28 14:09:13 pkunk genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2 (scsa2usb2) online
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd4 at scsa2usb2: target 0 lun 0
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] sd4 is /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2/disk@0,0
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2/disk@0,0 (sd4) online
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd5 at scsa2usb2: target 0 lun 1
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] sd5 is /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2/disk@0,1
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@0,0/pci1028,188@1d,3/storage@2/disk@0,1 (sd5) online
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 314293 kern.info] device pciclass,030000@0(display#0) keeps up device sd@0,0(disk#4), but the latter is not power managed
Jan 28 14:09:14 pkunk genunix: [ID 314293 kern.info] device pciclass,030000@0(display#0) keeps up device sd@0,1(disk#5), but the latter is not power managed

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I got a little bored last night and decided to drop OpenSolaris onto my old laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000).  I’ve messed around with OpenSolaris before from time to time, but only in a VM — never as the main OS on a machine.

So far it’s been pretty good – the live CD and installer are really slick.  The wireless in my laptop Just Worked (though amusingly enough the wired network didn’t – there doesn’t seem to be a Broadcom 4401 driver in the default install).  When I installed to the hard disk it even carried across the wireless SSID and WPA key I’d configured while booted into the livecd.  Getting the wired network going shouldn’t be a huge hassle – it looks like there’s a third party driver available for it, so I’ll try that out tonight.

X worked without much trouble, and came up antialiased by default.  Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like I’ve got hardware graphics acceleration (I’m using a Radeon Mobility X300), so Xorg uses 50%+ CPU whenever there’s a lot of graphical updates.  Fixing that may just be a matter of changing the driver X is selecting though; I haven’t spent much time looking into it.

There’s now a graphical package manager (closely modeled on Synaptic) with retrieval from Internet package repositories – a lot easier than downloading stuff by hand and installing it with pkgadd.  The package manager is also used to notify users about available updates, much the same as Ubuntu.

I even managed to get my USB EVDO modem working, but I’ll go into that in detail later.

In fact, there’s been remarkably little that hasn’t worked.  The only issue I’ve got currently (aside from what I’ve mentioned above) is that edge scrolling on the Synaptics trackpad doesn’t work at the moment.  And again, this may just be a matter of messing around with xorg.conf.

Looks like someone at IRD forgot to renew a certificate…

Why do you make it so fucking hard to keep the ‘Silently download and execute binary code on my computer without asking permission’ option in Firefox turned off?  I have a traffic-metered connection that I use during the day, I don’t want to download fucking web browser updates over it.

Would it really be that hard to make the setting stick between major revision updates?  I had it turned off in Firefox 2, why is it back on again in Firefox 3?  Most of my other settings managed to transfer over ok.

I want to know when I’m installing software on my computer.  I don’t want it to be done without my permission.

Also, fuck you.

My bike’s barely moved for probably the best part of a year, but I’ve been out on it a few times in the last couple of weeks.

Tonight’s ride: (and the same on Saturday)

Readymech papercraft deskpirate! (looking a little worse for wear when I found him while moving desks)