unsharpTech

Did a fresh install + updates of Kubuntu 8.10 on a customer’s laptop and had no wireless even though it’s an Atheros chipset.

Hardware:

• Laptop: Acer Aspire 4520
• Wireless Card: Atheros AR242x Communications Inc. 802.11abg

lspci | grep "Atheros"
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Resolution:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

After above install completes, reboot, then open up the Hardware Drivers manager (jockey-gtk or jockey-kde) and disable “Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” and make sure that “Support for 5xxx series of Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” is enabled then reboot. You may need to reboot to see both drivers in the Hardware Drivers manager.

This is at least a temporary fix, you’ll end up with the ath5k drivers- hopefully a stable universal method for Atheros card support will become available soon.

Source:
8.10 Release Notes | Ubuntu

I’ve often resorted to loading up a Linux livecd and running “lspci” just to get an idea of what hardware is in a box. Let’s face it, even if box manufacturers do provide the drivers you need, that model may have shipped with one of 4 different NICs, video cards, etc. So it used to be I had to run a linux cd and the lspci command to get the PCI devices table but not anymore…

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So even Windows lets you disable the Recent Documents feature, but for some reason Gnome really wants to remember what files you’ve been messing with. Personally I never use this menu item (usually under Places in the Gnome Main Menu) and find it to be a bit of a privacy concern.

Surprisingly enough there are no documented settings for Recent Documents, not even something in gconf-editor, so people have been going stone age to prevent this functionality. In the past you could change permissions for the file that stores the data in your home directory, but it seems in later versions of Gnome the following is the current method of choice.

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A lot of videos available from various sources are often encoded as .avi files close to 700MB in order to fit on a singleCD-R. This works out just great, but sometimes vids are split into two 700MB .avi files to fit two CDs so you get a Coolest-Movie-EVER_-_[2010][xVid](mp3)_dUff-mAn_CD1.avi and another but with “CD2” instead.

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I’ve always had some trouble with the syntax for accessing Nested Arrays and their Keys in PHP so I wanted to make note of this.

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Recently using osCommerce I had a customer who wished to have all the products’ names in uppercase but they had been entered in mixed case. After having some trouble finding a simple answer through Google, I pieced together this simple query that can also be adapted to other situations.

The below is a MySQL query to update all of the products’ names in an osCommerce catalog to uppercase - you can copy this into phpMyAdmin.

UPDATE products_description SET `products_name` = UPPER( `products_name` )

OR GENERICALLY:

UPDATE table_name SET `column_name` = UPPER( `column_name` )

If you lose any of your user passwords - including root you can change your password booting into single user mode. What you aren’t likely to find off the bat is the proper instructions to do it. They are out there, but chances are you will have to dig a little after some frustration. The main differece between all those super simple solutions and the one mentioned here is that you need to remount the OS drive in order to properly write your changes. This method has worked with the last three major releases of Ubuntu including Feisty. So, here’s the procedure…

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