RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.

64 Studio is a special Linux version for creating digital contents. It is a software collection based on Debian, containing many 64-bit audio and video editing applications.

Linux specialized for a 64-bit proc with applications for editing sound and video? Wait, isn’t that the Mac department?

Not anymore!

• CLI Magic: Searching with [the] find [command]. It’s more flexible than you thought.
• A Simple Linux Backup Method. An in-depth yet highly readable HOWTO for making backups that can be fully automated. If you’ve been putting off backing up your data because it’s too complex, your excuses end here.
• Enlightenment 17 QuickStart Guide. Everything that’s good about beautiful open-source software can be summed up in this Linux window manager. Beautiful.
• Data extraction via built-in text utilities. Do you know grep, awk, head, and tail like the back of your hand? Then click and learn.
• Linux Shell Scripting Basics. An excellent reference for the scripting n00b.
• Mastering wget. A great little article with pictures about wget. Remember when I crashed my home-grown server trying to mirror CCEL.org? Oh, no, you wouldn’t have remembered that part … but it happened!
• Regular Expression cheat sheet. This is a single PNG file you can print out or save to your local machine.

Quite useful, but SirDiggalot (from Digg.com) mentioned that perhaps the best way to get an archive from a remote machine that doesn’t have the resources (e.g., hard drive space) to make a complete tar backup is neglected:

cd /source/dir
tar -cf - . | ssh user@remote "(cd /destination/dir && tar -xpf -)“

Linux From Scratch. For the hardcore only: build your own Linux system, literally from the lowest level up. This isn’t like compiling your own distribution, though: this is like baking a cake by grinding your own flour. It might be the best cake you’ve ever eaten, and you’ll know exactly how to do it, but if you don’t have the stamina of an ultramarathoner and the patience of a tortoise, I can’t imagine being able to recommend this approach.

LearnLINUX: On the other hand, I can heartily recommend this for the novice! This is like a whole class in Linux, for free, online. Everything from Linux history to system administration and shell scripting. Bookmarked!

I’ve been trying to download a series of files for quite some time now; “old fashioned” means work, but not nearly so efficiently. So, being a die-hard Azureus user ever since I discovered BT a few years ago, I cranked up my copy again to try one last time. (Azureus is an outstanding, cross-platform, Java-based BitTorrent client, and the winner of the SourceForge Community Choice Award, Best Overall for 2006!) Now, previously, I had tried to crank up Azureus and had had limited success in even getting the program running.

I added the torrent I wanted, and waited for the notification icon to turn from “no peers” to seeds and peers connected in a healthy torrent swarm. I waited….

And waited.

And waited some more.

Eventually, I was getting Remotely established connections, but not any locally established. Safepeer wasn’t blocking any connections, for one thing, which is unusual: there are always a few miscellaneous IPs that fail the blacklist checks just from network error, if not from malice. My NAT was routing fine, everything was green, the tracker was returning an OK signal. Nothing. I couldn’t connect outward.

This time, I was on a mission. I was not giving up on this. So I opened up the built-in Azureus IRC support channel and started asking around. No leads.

A little Googling turned up nothing on the matter—until, a few hours later, I sat fuming at the console. What was going wrong? And since when did Azureus spout this many debug messages to stdout when running in the background in non-debug mode?

—That was the tip-off. I looked carefully at the console, freezing the output to allow me to examine the following:

DEBUG::[date]::[specific call that caused the error]
java.net.SocketException: Permission denied
at [snip much more debug nonsense here]

So the problem was in one of the 64-bit libraries in this copy of Azureus; Java was throwing an exception at the socket level: it didn’t have permissions to access the network. Furthermore, I had been using the GNU Java Compiler [roughly] equivalent to version 1.4.2 of Sun’s “official” Java. But Googling this turned up unhelpful results.

Then I tried downloading the latest Java from Sun for the AMD64 platform in an RPM file (wrapped in their license agreement, of course). But when I installed and ran “java -version” or “whereis java” at the console, the system didn’t even see the new install—it was still linked to the GNU compiler! Frustrated, I Googled again, this time for a way to hard-delete option for the GNU compiler, a way to remove it if not with yum or rpm then by hand and reassign the $JAVA_HOME variable….

Then I ran across this invaluable post on the Fedora Forums. The relevant part I’ll echo here to mirror the data, but the credit goes to bytesniper; this version is edited for typos and some emphasis:

There is a link in /usr/bin/java that actually starts java so it needs to be pointed to the correct java installation. The easiest way to do this (to presserve both or all installations of java) is to use alternatives.

if you type alternatives --config java you will see a single entry pointing to something like /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java.

all you need to do is add the link (path) to the new installation of java from sun

alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /pathto/sunjava/java 2
(usage is alternatives <link> <name> <path> <priority>)

once you add the new java configuration to alternatives all you need to do is activate, to tell the system this is what should be run as /usr/bin/java:

alternatives –config java
this will give you a menu of java installations. choose the second option (hence, priority 2) and hit enter. now when you type something like java -jar filename.jar it will use the sun java instead of the inlcuded gcj.

Note: You can also delete /usr/bin/java and make a new symbolic link to the java binary of the new java installation, but I do not recommend this.

When I set up Sun’s as my default Java installation, the problem then became the error when trying to load Azureus, “Wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64.” I was running the latest 64-bit installation of Azureus with the latest version of 64-bit Java on an Athlon64. Given that in this context, ELF stands for “Executable and Linking Format,” this error would be somewhat comparable to getting a “Wrong or Missing DLL” error in Windows when you’re absolutely certain that’s not the case. In short, it was infuriating.

After some more conversation and some more Googling, cyb2063 in the #Azureus-Support channel linked me to this workaround for Mandrake and Azureus on the AMD64 platform. Even after following the instructions to a tee, it still didn’t work.

At this point, I’ll be honest with you, I gave up. If the 64-bit class of my executable format is “wrong,” I figured, I’d just try the 32-bit version. Doing a clean install of 32-bit Azureus corrected all of those problems, and now it’s running like a dream.

NeoWin.net has the full email, which is echoed in blockquote at the end of this article (if you’re on the main page, click “more…” at the bottom of the post).

Guy Kewney posted an insightful write-up on this at TheRegister, in which the critical line seems to be, “As chairman, without needing to worry about whether Vista will be 18 or 30 months late, his influence could paradoxically be far greater. As a Captain of industry, his guidance is far more than just “some geek with money” - he understands the law and what is possible, and what is not, better than any of his contemporaries.” BillG goes from son of lawyers to hardcore programmer to chairman of a multibillion-dollar corporation—and finally to a wielder of political power greater than the power of two lawyers like his parents. (Cf. also Kewney’s response to readers’ responses to his article.)

Meanwhile, I’m intrigued by the sentiment that has arisen not only at Digg and Slashdot and other major cybercenters of geekdom, but all over the Web—kind, almost tender words from people whose vitriol toward “Gates’ corporate imperialism” had previously been unmatchable (and betimes unreadable). Why the switch? I think it has a lot to do with the feeling of losing one’s most formidable opponent—old gods having battled one another across the centuries and lands stand, hands on hilts; one bows, turns, and walks into the ancient mist. Of course, the sentiment is incomplete, or should be, since Gates isn’t dead and neither is MS, but many hardcore Linux geeks realize this is the passing of an era.

When I read Gates (© 1993, 1994 by Stephen Manes & Paul Andrews) over ten years ago, I was fascinated by the idea of a few geeks (hackers, even!) getting together, sleeping under fluorescent lights of your old rented office building, working for twenty hours at a clip on programming the Next Big Thing, ordering in pizza and making mid-day beer runs. Especially coding the “rest” of DOS on a plane on the way to show it off (true story). When something happens of this magnitude, as it must, it must remind some old Linux geeks of the young William Henry Gates III, hacker.

But it’s also a warning. Now, MS becomes faceless: the funny, obnoxiously ubiquitous “Gates of Borg” picture is replaced by a simple sans-serif logo. As Linux gains more prominence on the desktop, especially through Ubuntu and Fedora Core, it has a long battle ahead of it.

From: MSBILLG
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 1:41 PM
To: Microsoft and Subsidiaries: All FTE
Subject: My Transition Plans

I wanted to take a moment to share some of my thoughts, as well.

As Steve’s mail indicates, I’ve decided that two years from now, in July 2008, I want to devote more time to the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Right now and for the next two years, my full-time job is here at Microsoft, and my part-time job remains the Foundation. Beginning in July 2008, I will switch that, to be full-time at the Foundation, while remaining involved with Microsoft as Chairman and an advisor on key development projects on a part-time basis.

To prepare for this change, we have a well-thought-out transition process. Again, I will continue at Microsoft full-time for the next two years, but over the course of those two years, my day-to-day responsibilities will shift to a team of incredible technical leaders who are already doing amazing things at the company.

I feel very lucky that we’ve got extraordinary technical leaders at the company, like Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie, who can step up to assume the roles that I’ve played. I’ve known Ray for the last 20 years, and he has created some of the most important developments in the industry. Craig and I have worked together for nearly 14 years, and he’s been a technical visionary and a leader on policy throughout his career. With Ray and Craig stepping up, I feel very confident that the technical stewardship of Microsoft is in very capable hands.
And I feel the same way about our business leadership. Our core businesses are strong and we have a clear vision for how we will meet new challenges and opportunities. We just had our first $12 billion quarter, and we continue to generate almost a billion dollars in profit every month. We are about to launch breakthrough versions of Windows, Office and Exchange, which are already generating a lot of excitement.

Six years ago, Steve and I made a major transition when he stepped up to be CEO. He’s done a fantastic job by every measure, whether it’s the people he’s brought in, the new ways he’s running the company, or just the objective results - like doubling our revenue in six years. Steve has driven us to make bold bets on things like Xbox, Real Time Communications, business applications, IPTV, and many others including the Live platform. Steve is the best CEO I could imagine for Microsoft - he is changing the company in ways it needs to be changed. He is bringing in new leadership at all levels. And, he is focused on the long-term - making Microsoft a great company not just today but for decades to come.

With Steve’s organization of the company into three divisions led by our incredible presidents - Jeff Raikes, Robbie Bach, and Kevin Johnson - we’ve laid a solid foundation for greater autonomy, agility and entrepreneurial spirit in our product groups. And with the great addition of Kevin Turner as our COO, our leadership team has never been stronger.

Our deep technical strength is one of the key reasons I believe Microsoft is well-positioned for great success in the years ahead. I’m very pleased that in addition to Ray, Craig, David and Rick, Steve has asked J Allard, Bob Muglia, and Steven Sinofsky to play an expanded role in shaping the company’s business and technology strategy. And when you consider all of our remarkable Technical Fellows, Distinguished Engineers, all of the brilliant researchers working at our MSR labs around the world, and all the technical people in the business groups, I can safely say that our technical talent has never been stronger or deeper.

Obviously, this has been a very hard decision for me. Microsoft will always be a huge part of my life, and I’m lucky to have two callings that are so important and so challenging.

On a personal note, I know that my work on global health and education issues at the Foundation would never have been possible without the enormous success of Microsoft, so I want to thank you and all of the employees past and present who have contributed so much to this company.

For these last 31 years, I’ve had the best job in the world. I’ve worked with some of the brightest and most passionate people in the world. Together, we’ve built a great company whose products have empowered people around the world.

We’re only at the beginning of what software can do, and I’m excited about the impact that Microsoft can have. I’m going to take an extended vacation this summer with my family, but I’ll be back in late August and I look forward to working with all of you for the next two years and beyond, to make those dreams a reality.

Thanks.

Bill

You can order CDs of it for free, or download the ISOs via BitTorrent—legally, thankyouverymuch— and create your own discs (CDs or DVDs).

I’m looking toward Gentoo personally, but if you’re unfamiliar with Linux, this is reputed to be the best option, and easier to install than even Windows XP!

Happy installs!

read more | digg story

This is big news, since Linux users are missing out presently on content made for Flash 8. Granted, it’s not due out till late this year or early next, but it’s an important step in the right direction for Linux support—notably, this will be released when the rest of the population (Windows, Mac) sees it, instead of lagging months behind on half-assed development.

read more | digg story

Well, now, behold:

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), the consortium dedicated to the adoption of Linux, and freedesktop.org, the open-source project focused on interoperability for X Window System desktops, announced the technology preview of the first set of common interfaces for the GNOME and KDE Linux desktops, today at LinuxWorld in Boston.

(From DesktopLinux.com)

Glad tidings to be sure! As it stands, each one looks backward and ugly in the other (that is, GNOME programs called while the user is under the KDE desktop will look, well, awful), but this common API is the first step in integrating the two. I agree with those who say that the difference between the two has been hurting the conversion to Linux by mainstream Windows users: it’s too complicated to try to figure out the difference, and because there’s such a polarized opinion base on this matter, it just confuses those who might otherwise be willing to give Linux a shot.

I realized after a while that it wasn’t necessarily AAC that I wanted to play, or MP4, or what-have-you; but aacPlus. I didn’t and, frankly, still don’t, know the difference between the two, but apparently they’re different enough for XMMS to shrug at the latter.

The “Software Audio Players for Linux & BSD” is helpful, but having downloaded numerous of them, I can say that most of them require lengthy compiles and obnoxiously need more fiddling than I have/had time for.

Try Xine, though; it works for me, for a while. It has crashed consistently if I leave it on overnight, or even for more than about eight consecutive hours, but that aside, it’s a good player (especially if you need one NOW).

Google pointed me to BornAgainRadio, where I found an article about how much better aacPlus is than MP3, and I was sold; Xine helps make it happen for me right now, but if you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

So, here’s the solution.

Type in about:config in the address bar, then search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL and double-click it to set that value to false. The change will take place immediately. Happy browsing!

Olle’s “oguru” program [link to actual program here] works. Unfortunately, it’s only a once-invoked, stdout-based commandline version.

Tobias van Dyk, on the other hand, created a plugin for GKrellM2 based on oguru that updates the CPU, system, and power supply temperature and shows the voltages of several key monitors by interfacing with the chip and displaying this information in GKrellM2. You can find this plugin here.

When compiling, if you’re on an x86_64 machine like I am, you’re going to need to update the line #include <asm/io.h> to say, #include <sys/io.h> as on Athlon 64 machines, calls to either asm-i386 or asm-x86_64 as such are deprecated (and asm alone isn’t defined at all!).

Note that in order to run this plugin without a segfault from GKrellM2, you’re going to need to run it as root.

Remember this, folks.

As root, change the number `5′ in the line in /etc/inittab that says id:5:initdefault to a 3. This will load everything up through the network, but not start the X server.

This is important when your video card drivers require X to be shut down. Meanwhile, if you have the runlevel set to five and X won’t shut up, it’s like those trick self-relighting birthday cake candles, only seven or eight times as annoying!

Also remember, Nvidia > ATI when it comes to graphics support for Linux. I voted with my dollars. Nvidia’s closed-source, but they have real Linux support; ATI Linux support looks like everyone else’s from back in mid ‘95.

The Projectfiles.com Linux Firewall is the swiss army knife of Linux firewall software. Based on the netfilter-iptables tools, the firewall is a single shell executable written in bash with configuration options and basic documentation included in the same file. It is a flexible tool for building secure networks, designed for use with all types of systems: workstations, routers, and servers, plus it includes optional features for advanced users and Internet Service Providers.

Always remember, Ctrl+C is your friend!

read more | digg story

If you create an annoying electronic message without using your real, legal name, you could be fined and jailed for no greater than two years. Great going, USA. Now we’re all in danger of making the wrong guy angry. Thanks to Jeff for this info.

“Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

UPDATE: See this article for a somewhat more coherent explanation.

The good news? Grisoft is offering free home Linux AVG virus protection. Check out their article (ad?) here. As yet unsure of whether this is a gimmick for more publicity, but we’ll see. If it stays free and actually works, they may have just bought themselves the approval of an entire community of home Linux users.

Because even thinkers need some old video games for fun and nostalgia (not profit), once in a while.

[mike@tek1024 azureus]$ ./azureus
Starting Azureus...
Java exec found in PATH. Verifying...
Suitable java version found [java = 1.5.0_06]
Configuring environment...
Loading Azureus:
java -Xms16m -Xmx128m -cp "/home/mike/download/azureus/Azureus2.jar:/home/mike/download/azureus/swt.jar" -Djava.library.path="/home/mike/download/azureus" -Dazureus.install.path="/home/mike/download/azureus" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main ''Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/mike/download/azureus/libswt-pi-gtk-3139.so: /home/mike/download/azureus/libswt-pi-gtk-3139.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:123)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.OS.(OS.java:19)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Converter.wcsToMbcs(Converter.java:63)
at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Converter.wcsToMbcs(Converter.java:54)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.(Display.java:122)
at org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.mainwindow.SWTThread.(SWTThread.java:75)
at org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.mainwindow.SWTThread.createInstance(SWTThread.java:58)
at org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.mainwindow.Initializer.(Initializer.java:108)
at org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main.(Main.java:123)
at org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main.main(Main.java:142)
Azureus TERMINATED.

Having downloaded the latest SWT for 64 bit GTK windowing didn’t help either. Finally broke down to use the plain old x86, 32-bit version and it worked flawlessly. What gives?

If you’d like to use the latest Flash and Java plugins with Firefox on Fedora Core 4 for x86_64 arch, here’s how.

Replacing 64-bit with 32-bit Firefox

1. Remove Firefox x86_64 with yum:
   # yum remove firefox
2. Add an i386 repository (”repo”; replace nedit in the following line with the editor of your choice); if it asks you to create a new file, do so:
   # nedit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-base-i386.repo
3. That file must contain the following:
   [base-i386]
name=base-i386
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
   Save and close.
4. Download and install the i386 version of Firefox and its dependencies, of which there were three for me (20M total):
   # yum --enablerepo=base-i386 install firefox.i386

Installing Flash Player

1. Go to the Macromedia Flash Downloads page, and download the file it offers for Linux (”install_flash_player_7_linux.tar.gz”).
2. Extract that file from the place you downloaded it (it will create its own folder):
   $ tar -zxvf install_flash_player_7_linux.tar.gz
3. Enter the folder it creates. You will at this point be tempted to run ./flashplayer-installer, but don’t: it offers nothing more than a nasty error message and exits, and it may tempt you to despair. Do no such thing! Where the installer script fails, you shan’t. Simply copy two of the files inside the folder to one of two locations.

   For all users:
   # cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
# cp flashplayer.xpt /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

   For you alone:
   $ cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
$ cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

You will now be able to use Flash Player!

To install the Java plugin:

1. Make a directory in /opt called “java”; you’ll put the JRE you download here.
   # mkdir /opt/java
2. Grab the self-extracting, 32-bit, non-RPM JRE from Sun’s Java-for-Linux download site. (64-bit versions are marked with “AMD64″.) Navigate to the download folder.
3. Change the mode of the file to be executable, then execute it as a user (just to be safe); notice that your version will likely be different as Java updates occur:
   # chmod +x jre-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin
$ ./jre-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin
4. Page through the license agreement and agree to it. When it’s done extracting everything, copy the entire folder it made (”jre-1_5_0_06″ on my machine) to the folder “/opt/java” you made earlier.
5. Navigate to the universal Firefox directory, or, again, the user-only version (cf. option two under “Installing Flash Player”), if you’d like:
   cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
6. Make a symbolic link from the Java installation you just made to this directory (again, check your version! yours may and probably will be different):
   # ln -s /opt/java/jre1.5.0_06/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so .

You should now be able to use Flash and Java in your browser; enjoy! (Props and credits to jcliburn on LinuxQuestions.org.)