Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

The other day I realized that Linux Mint wasn’t receiving the official security updates from Ubuntu. My Ubuntu Studio desktop had update after update while my Linux Mint desktop had nothing. Strange - so I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 - LTS edition because my laptop’s ATI card wasn’t supported in the newer version of Ubuntu 9.04. I at least wanted the support that was available until April 2011 from Canonical. I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 will all codecs and additonal software and then decided to install even more with the Ubuntu Studio upgrade. That installed the real-time kernel which I was dying to try out. Unfortunately, an error I had experienced in the past came back up dealing with the wifi drivers and the new kernel location. I blogged about it before but it’s not even worth mentioning now. As a reminder to everyone, I use a Toshiba Satellite A215 that has an ATI chipset and Atheros chipset. I couldn’t upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 because the FGLRX driver is completely corrupted in the newest version of Ubuntu. I still tote the Ubuntu decal on my laptop but I have definitely ventured out to other distros. Besides the 9.04 issue and my keeping 8.04 as the LTS edition, I have been experiencing a few other issues such as Blender never working correctly on any version of my Ubuntu installed on my laptop (worked great on nVidia desktop) and the inability to go into suspend without breaking the system on resume.

This last week has been extremely frustrating and all because of wifi. I really need to stretch the cable modem 5 feet closer in my general direction. I first upgraded from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 without error. Everything worked perfectly fine. Then I installed Ubuntu Studio 9.04 with an eagerness to get a clean install on my computer and wipe off some of the junk from residual upgrades and package installs. I installed Ubuntu Studio 9.04 onto my nVidia desktop (because my ATI laptop obviously won’t cut it). The wifi didn’t work immediately. I’ve installed openSUSE, Fedora and several versions of Ubuntu and my Linksys WUSB54G wireless adapter worked everytime. For some reason, Studio 9.04 wouldn’t see it. I tried a few things and got no where. I’m going to have to have a few drinks with the makers of ndiswrapper and MadWifi to try and get a better grip on how exactly wifi works in Linux. So I have a DD-WRT router that I use as a repeater and I tried to configure it through Studio’s copy of Firefox. Studio froze time after time while trying to configure it and I gave up on it. Apparently the real-time kernel is very unstable. I’ll have to look into it.

I’ve tried to do this multiple times with Ubuntu yet never suceeded for some reason. I purchased a full Skype package the other day and I’ve been stuck on Vista as I could never get the audio to work on Ubuntu. I tried a few new distros the other day after the ATI incident with Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and Linux Mint 6. Ubuntu Studio 8.04 failed due to a few random issues such as the Linux headers error. I was unable to compile the madwifi modules against the kernel and I dropped it. I grew tired of this wifi issue and decided to move on. I read many reviews about Linux Mint - an unofficial variant of Ubuntu that has a few additional packages and supposedly wifi readiness. My wifi didn’t work off the bat but at least I was able to compile it easily. I use Linux Mint because it is Ubuntu made easy - essentially. The latest version is based off of Ubuntu 8.10. They are working on the Linux Mint 7 version that is based on 9.04.