Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

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.

After that, I started to research openSUSE. Mixed reviews all over the web. Some are dedicated to its cleanliness and stability. Others refuse to even consider openSUSE because somewhere back in 2006, the company that commercially sponsors openSUSE - Novell - made a patent agreement (or something like that) with Microsoft which from I’ve read, gives Microsoft the last word as to what openSUSE can and will be used for. Hmmm, sounds outlandish but it’s 2009 and openSUSE is still open and created by the community. Supposedly there is some legal jargon in the EULA that states that, at any time, your copy of openSUSE could be severed from its mortal coil and left without upgrades at the discretion of Microsoft and Novell. If any of that doesn’t bother you, then you might just have a stable Linux OS. Wifi and nVidia graphics worked immediately. The YaST installer worked much like APT does in Ubuntu. openSUSE is RPM based so lookout world. I prefer DEB but that’s a matter of opinion. I believe that having commercial sponsorship the size of Novell and Microsoft supporting a Linux OS is a great opportunity to subvertly sneak Linux into the working man’s desktop. Maybe I’m wrong but openSUSE worked fine for me - well almost. I was trying to install Adobe Flash player (because I develop in Flash) and it would not function properly in Firefox. It’s fickle but I only have so much time to mess with these seemingly insignificant details. I HAVE to have Flash in Linux and if it doesn’t work, it isn’t ready for the mainstream in my opinion. Half of my web experience is Flashed based. Given I could have tried the 2 alternative open-source players but I don’t have the time to worry about whether or not my web apps and Flash sites are displaying properly in open-source and proprietary Flash players. ENOUGH about that already.

Back to Ubuntu Studio 9.04. Want it to work? Try doing a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04 and then adding the studio packages via terminal. There is a string that you can use to quickly upgrade your “vanilla” Ubuntu to Ubuntu Studio:

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-desktop ubuntustudio-audio ubuntustudio-audio-plugins ubuntustudio-graphics ubuntustudio-video ubuntustudio-artwork ubuntustudio-gdm-theme ubuntustudio-icon-theme ubuntustudio-look ubuntustudio-session-splashes ubuntustudio-sounds ubuntustudio-screensaver ubuntustudio-theme ubuntustudio-wallpapers usplash-theme-ubuntustudio wired
Try this link for more custom information on Ubuntu Studio upgrades. I realize that he is talking about Gutsy but the same applies for later versions.

http://ubuntumusic.blogspot.com/2007/05/upgrade-to-ubuntu-studio.html