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

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.

[Read the rest]

So when I first got my Black Asus Eee PC 4G xmas ‘07 I pretty much freaked out about all the possibilities but ended up installing my distro of choice, Arch Linux and all the Eee specific hardware support, then it kinda sat… and sat, until. I recently decided to review the current OS choices available for the Eee and settled on eeeXubuntu as the best candidate - clean little Ubuntu based with Eee hardware support out of the box. Besides, I just wanted to use my Eee not fiddle with the thing (I had my fill a few months ago, it was fun though).

[Read the rest]

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…

[Read the rest]

So I had $20 to spend on a new mouse + keyboard combo over at Newegg and ended up with a cheap Logitech mouse and a black A4 Tech Slim Keyboard. I picked up this little item for $10 (Newegg product page) because I love the short key travel and feedback of laptop keyboards.

[Read the rest]