A Man and his Penguin

This new r8187 driver is fucking nuts!

I finally got FED UP TO THE GILLS of the crappy wireless. I was going to
buy an Atheros-based card, but I decided to go down the cheapo route
instead and see if I could just build the latest rtl8187 driver.

So I followed the instructions here
(http://zenzike.blogspot.com/2008/11/wireless-woes.html) to build it and
apply the patch to get it running on the 2.6.27 kernels. It immediately
connected to an unsecured wireless network in the area that I had
assumed used MAC filtering, that I had never been able to connect to
before with this computer or with the Aspire One.

And I’m surfing on this network now! Not only that, but I’m getting
better signal strength reported on it than before, and I’m picking up
three other networks that I could previously only pick up on the Aspire
One! There’s even a network that I’ve never seen on the Aspire One!

There’s just one slight flaw: There’s no WPA support. I’d have to change
my own network to WEP in order to connect. But yeah, this is an
amazingly cool driver and I want to have its children. In fact, I want to move to Denmark because they probably permit marriage between humans and kernel modules.

What isn’t cool is Parcellite clipboard manager. I’m currently running XFCE, and for some reason Parcellite is running twice. So, I’m guessing, at least one of them should manage my clipboard? Think again. I copied a bunch of text from a Gedit window, closed the window, and tried to paste into Firefox. Nothing. I kept Gedit’s window open and it worked. I closed one of the Parcellites and tried the original test, and it didn’t work. I really must wonder why there are so many clipboard managers out there, as there are only very minor differences between them. Except that some of them work as your clipboard, and some only claim to.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 4:47 am and is filed under Open-source application software, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.