1. Realtek 8191SE WiFi on Thinkpad Edge13… again

    Once again WiFi on the Edge flakes out. This time it’s a new broadband router furnished by O2. We’ve been upgraded from the O2WirelessBox II to the O2WirelessBox IV. The excitement is almost… non-existant.

    Key to this story is the addition of wireless 802.11N which the Realtek card can handle. Except that it can’t with the Linux drivers (and it seems it flakes out on some Win7 setups as well). 

    The bad news is that the usual recourse of rolling a new driver from the latest on the Realtek site didn’t work for us, and using iwconfig to force the card not to use N didn’t work either - seems the card doesn’t allow that (the command being: iwconfig wlan0 modulation 11g). 

    So I had to disable N on the router which owners of the O2WirelessBox IV will find cannot be done from the GUI. So for this now very niche demographic, here’s what to do:

    > telnet o2wirelessbox.lan
Trying 192.168.1.254...
Connected to o2wirelessbox.lan.
Escape character is '^]'.
Username : SuperUser
Password : 
... splash text...
{SuperUser}=>wireless
{SuperUs{SuperUser}[wireless]=>radio
Admin [up] Oper [up] band [2.4GHz] Interop [802.11b/g/n] channel[11]

    So from this we see that 802.11N is enabled. To restrict:

    {SuperUs{SuperUser}[wireless]=>radio interop = 802.11b/g
{SuperUs{SuperUser}[wireless]=>radio
Admin [up] Oper [up] band [2.4GHz] Interop [802.11b/g] channel[11]

    Now disconnect all devices - actually I’d suggest going via the GUI and disabling WiFi, then re-enabling and have all clients re-connect. You should be good to go now. 

    One caveat: this setting does not seem to survive a re-boot. There is probably a way to make it persistent but already I’ve lost a little too much time to this one so for now, this blog will be my memory! 

  2. Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2

    Not the most thrilling of titles, to be sure, but if you’re looking to dive into the world of Amazon Web Services by starting up some EC2 instances from the Canonical AMIs then my working notes may be of interest. I encountered a couple of problems on the way, but little that did more than expose my ignorance!

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  3. Ubuntu 10.04 on LVM

    I never get partition sizes right; too much root, too little root etc. So I’m going to re-build my notebook with LVM partitioning, just for kicks. Ubuntu Server CDs support LVM install from the “Expert” mode, but it doesn’t look like the desktop variants do. Given that they save me a fair bit of work subsequently, I’ll therefore work around that.

    My starting point will probably be http://bit.ly/92oE - I’ll write up my discoveries here.

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  4. ThinkPad Edge: Skype…

    Hot on the heals of the WiFi issue solved yesterday, we have a Skype problem. Here are the observations:

    • Gnome sound recorder works fine, records from mic
    • Playback is fine
    • Run Skype, make test call. Nothing.
    • Now Gnome sound recorder fails to record anything: it immediately stops when you hit record.

    Now you’re stuck. Reboot. Still recording is broken throughout. So how do we get around this?

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  5. Lenovo ThinkPad Edge WiFi with Ubuntu 10.04

    The Lenovo Thinkpad Edge is a rather nice notebook from the budget end of the Lenovo range. It makes savings in the right places (screen not quite as high res as the expensive models; no carbon fibre; fewer things that blink) whilst retaining a solid, well built feel. Just one problem: under Ubuntu (Lucid - 10.04) the wifi doesn’t really work… 

    NB: As of the update providing kernel 2.6.32-22 Wifi appears to work out of the box, thus rendering this article redundant.

    NB(b): Ubuntu 10.10 was found again to be unstable; as of writing the latest Realtek drivers, installed as per this article, seem to be more stable.

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