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January 24, 2007
House, cars and life in general
Okay, so today is a day of news ... so I had to share.
First, a status update on the house situation. Last time I posted about our house hunt, we were still waiting on financing and I mentioned that we had found a house that really liked. Well, shoot to a month later and we're basically in the same situation ... we're still looking for a house. However, our financing did go through. We did make an offer on the other house that we were looking at, however the counter offer that came back didn't sit well with either of us so we decided to pass.
So, we went looking again recently and found a really nice house in a really nice (and new) neighborhood. Amanda took dad to look it over this afternoon and he gave it the thumbs up. We decided to make an offer, so Skip (our realtor) came over this evening and we signed all the paperwork ... again.
Seriously ... how many documents do you have to sign when you're actually buying the darn thing? Just making an offer takes an hour to fill out the paperwork.
We also heard back on the car situation. Basically, the timing chain broke and the valves WERE warped ... so we had to decide if we wanted to rebuild the top of the engine or replace the motor all-together. We managed to find a motor that has 12,000 miles on it with all the goodies (AC, power steering, etc) for roughly $1000.00. I know a good deal when I hear it, so we jumped on it. So, now my new car will be significantly newer when it's all said and done.
Hopefully I'll get the thing back sooner rather than later.
Finally, I've been staying pretty busy these days. Between work and more work, I find it hard to get in any good "relax time" for myself. Then I need to make sure that I get to spend some time with Amanda so we can enjoy one another's company and before you know it, the night is over and it's time for bed. No time for games, no time for posting on the blog ... etc etc etc.
Work has been going pretty good. I've gotten some good reviews from my superiors as of late, which is always a good thing. It's nice to know that the hard work that you put in on a daily basis is seen and appreciated. What's even more interesting is that I'm getting ready to cross over a major milestone ... my first year anniversary with the company. And what a year it has been too. We've gone from having absolutely nothing to a full working plant in a year. My IT department has grown leaps and bounds, and we're continuing to grow on a regular basis. I'm expecting to have around 20 employees under my wing within the next few months.
Thank goodness for my right hand man, Dave. Without his help, I don't know where I'd be right now.
Lets see ... what else?
The German studies have been going pretty slow. It all falls back to the time issue that I mentioned before. I have all kinds of great study material, but I really haven't had any kind of time to put towards it. Learning a language isn't one of those things that you can just put a little bit of time in here and there and expect to learn everything quickly. It takes time and dedication. I have the desire and dedication, just not the time. Hopefully that'll change in the near future.
So, I guess that's all I have for the time being.
Auf Wiedersehen!
... heraus~
Posted by ed at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2007
Learning German
My brother in Germany, Roger, and I share the same father but have different mothers (obviously). This month, his mother, Linda, has come to the US for a visit for a few weeks. Linda is a sweet lady, and she is still in the process of learning English. I've been helping her learn, mostly correcting grammar mistakes.
Now, it's no secret to anyone who knows me that I want to go to Germany very badly. I've always wanted to go to Europe, and having family over there only makes a trip that much more appealing. Now that I've met both Roger and Linda, I think I would feel very comfortable taking a trip across the pond to Deutschland.
I knew that if I wanted to go to Germany, I really needed to begin learning some German. I've been speaking with Linda on a fairly regular basis, and have been picking up some words here and there. I've also acquired some study guides from Amanda's work and a few books from one of my employees at work. This evening, Dad gave me some CDs and books, in addition to a translation device to bring home and use to study. I'm planning on transferring the CD's to my iPod this evening and keeping it and the books he gave me with me to learn as much as I can in as short of a time as possible.
At this point, I'd say that I'm doing pretty good. Amanda and I have been learning German together, and we've gotten the alphabet and numbers 1-100 down at this point. We've also learned some greetings and a few general words to use. I'm in the process of understanding masculine and feminine use of words, things like I, you, he, she, it and more.
I feel like if I do this for a few months, I'll be able to speak fluent German in no time. I just need to keep up my studies ... keeping myself from procrastinating too much.
Wish me luck on the particular journey ... I'm going to need it. :)
Auf Wiedersehen!
... heraus~
Posted by ed at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2007
Wireless networking in OpenSUSE 10.2
As I'm sure that everyone is aware by now, I've been using SUSE Linux 10.1 both here at home and at work. OpenSUSE 10.2 was released a few weeks ago, and I was excited about the new features that were included with 10.2. After installation I had one main problem: my wireless USB adapter wasn't working properly.
There is a built-in wireless module for my network card in the kernel. The rt2500usb module works out of the box, but it's very slow and doesn't display signal strength in the NetworkManager application. These problems are potential deal breakers for me. The slow speeds won't work because I can't take advantage of my fast Internet connection. I'm also a good distance from the wireless router, so I need to know what my signal strengths are at all times.
So, I decided to install my trusty fall-back measure ... the ndiswrapper utility. For those of you who don't know what this application is, I'll explain. Ndiswrapper is a wrapper for network adapters in Linux using standard Windows drivers. Since many wireless network vendors don't readily supply a module to use in Linux, this application can be used to make your wireless adapter work properly.
By using the ndiswrapper, it doesn't matter what wireless adapter I use. I don't have to ask myself "will this work with Linux" when I'm purchasing wireless networking hardware. All I need is ndiswrapper and a working Windows driver. I've used this method to achieve wireless access on my Linux boxes both here at home and at work successfully many many times over.
Then comes OpenSUSE 10.2.
Before this installation with OpenSUSE 10.2, I have never had a single issue with the ndiswrapper or Windows drivers in Linux. They just worked on the first try. For some reason, in OpenSUSE 10.2 the latest version of ndiswrapper (v1.33) doesn't work properly using and the current drivers for my wireless adapter, a WUSB54Gv4 (v20050503).
After installation, the NetworkManager application could see the wireless adapter and would show the wireless routers near me. But, no matter how many times I tried, I could never connect to my router. I tried many different things to get it running, but nothing worked. I couldn't get a connection to save my life.
I decided to revert to some older drivers and an older copy of ndiswrapper. I keep older backups of software and drivers on my usb flash drive as a precautionary measure, just in case if something like this ever happens. After some fiddling, I finally managed to get my wireless connection back up and running using the backup software and drivers.
So, be warned ... if you're using OpenSUSE 10.2 and the latest version of the ndiswrapper (v1.33) and driver for the WUSB54Gv4 (v20050503) with the NetworkManager, you may experience these same problems.
Now, to explain what I did to get everything working properly.
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Instructions for Installing NDISWRAPPER and WUSB54G in OpenSUSE 10.2
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1) First, Linux needs to unload the rt2500usb module that's included with the distribution. To do this, run the following command to unload the module from the system:
rmmod rt2500usb
Check to make sure that the module is no longer loaded in the system with this command:
lsmod | grep rt2500usb
If anything comes up with the second command, re-run the rmmod command until it is completely gone from the list. It should return absolutely nothing.
2) Once the module is unloaded, I need to make sure that it doesn't load again when the computer is rebooted. To do this, you need to add the following to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file:
blacklist rt2500usb
This will tell OpenSUSE 10.2 to ignore this module on boot.
3) Next, you need to install the ndiswrapper module to the system. I'm assuming that you already have the file downloaded and untarred. As root, run the following commands in the ndiswrapper directory:
make uninstall (note: this command removes any previous installations of ndiswrapper)
make
make install
Note: Remain logged in as root through the rest of these instructions.
To make sure that ndiswrapper is running, type out the following command:
ndiswrapper -v
This will show what version of ndiswrapper that has been installed on your sytem. If you get nothing back from running this command, ndiswrapper isn't properly installed on your system.
4) Now, we need to install the Windows driver. Again, I'm assuming that you've already unzipped the exe and have navigated to the directory where the .inf file is located:
ndiswrapper -i xxxxxx.inf
Replace xxxxxx.inf with the proper .inf file that's in the driver directory. This will install the driver to the ndiswrapper. To make sure that it's properly installed, run the following command:
ndiswrapper -l
This will return information regarding the driver installed in ndiswrapper. If it's working, you should see something like the following:
rt2500usb driver installed, hardware present
IMPORTANT NOTE: You may see the following return when running this command:
rt2500usb driver installed, hardware (13B1:001A) present (alternate driver: conflict)
This means that there is more than one .conf file in the /etc/ndiswrapper directory. Sometimes when installing a Windows driver, it will put more than one .conf file in this directory. Make note of the hex number listed, in the example above it's 13B1:001A, and remove any .conf file that doesn't match this file in the /etc/ndiswrapper directory. This will resolve this error.
5) Now, we need to create an entry in Linux that will cause the ndiswrapper to auto-load on boot. Run the following command:
ndiswrapper -m
This will write the proper configuration information to the modprobe.conf file, making sure that ndiswrapper will load each and every single time to boot your machine.
6) Next, lets load the module into the system:
modprobe ndiswrapper
And verify that the module has been loaded:
lsmod | grep ndiswrapper
If you don't see anything return from this command, run the modprobe command again and check to see if you can see it listed. If not, you may have missed a step in the setup. Check your steps again to make sure that you didn't miss anything.
7) Once the driver is loaded in the ndiswrapper utility and we've loaded the module using modprobe, we need to make sure that the network card is using the ndiswrapper module. To change this, open YaST and go to "Network Devices". Under this section, you will find an option for "Network Card". Click on this and it will open the YaST configuration for network cards. Be sure to choose "NetworkManager" under the Setup Method, and click Next to continue.
When this module opens, you should see your wireless network card listed. In my case, it displays "Cisco-Linksys Wireless-G USB Network Adapter". Select this from the list and click on the "Edit" button below to continue.
Now you are in the configuration portion of the network card. At the bottom of the window, there is a button marked "Advanced". When you click on this button, a list of options appears. Select "Hardware Details" to continue.
This will put you in the Manual Network Card Configuration window. At this point, you should see a field called "Module Name". This should have the old rt2500usb module listed. Click in this field and type in "ndiswrapper" (without the quotes) and click "OK" to continue. Click "Next" in the next two windows to finish the configuration, and you'll be good to go.
8) Finally, lets restart the networking for safe measure to make sure that everything is working properly:
rcnetwork restart
You should see the NetworkManager disappear for a moment then come back up. Give the device a moment to detect the wireless access points around you, then select your wireless device from the list provided.
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NOTES:
For those who are curious, I'm using ndiswrapper version 1.26 which can be downloaded from the Sourceforge Web site.
For the Linksys WUSB54Gv4 wireless adapter driver, here is the driver info directly from the rt2500usb.inf file:
[Version]
DriverVer=04/13/2005, 2.00.02.0000
Signature="$Chicago$"
Compatible=1
Class=Net
ClassGUID={4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
Provider=%Provider%
CatalogFile=rt2500usb.CAT ;for WHQL certified
Side Note: I'm sorry to report that I don't know where to find this driver version at this point in time, as Linksys has removed access to it from their Web site. I've attempted to find another link somewhere on the net, but to no avail. If anyone knows where I can find this driver so I can link to it, please post a comment to this blog. :)
Update: After some research, I've found some older drivers on the DriverGuide.com site. You'll have to jump through a hundred hoops to sign up for the free account, but if you need an older driver, it'll probably be worth it. Just search through the Linksys drivers for WUSB54G and you should find what you're looking for.
~out...
Posted by ed at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)