In a follow-up to my post about 64bit Linux and Vodafone 3G Dongles, here’s how I got it working under 32bit linux:

• Download and install beta3
• edit your blacklist file and blacklist airprime
• remove airprime (modprobe -r airprime)
• Plug in your dongle
• Run the Vodafone Mobile Connect software

I’m currently connected using my 3G dongle under Ubuntu 8.04 (32bit) – everything is working fine.

After a little bit of work and a strange error, I managed to get one of Vodafone’s Huawei E172 USB 3G dongles working with 64-bit Ubuntu.

I used the 2.0beta3 AMD64 drivers (I’ll be trying the i386 ones on my laptop later), however the device, whilst detected, would never connect – it would always immediately hang up after CHAP authentication.

Digging around it became apparent that if an incorrect APN is used, the connection will either hangup immediately, or bad IP addresses will be delivered.

So, here’s the details needed:
APN: Internet (with a capital “I”)

Using this APN with the provided username, password and dial number, and the 20betas3 Vodafone Mobile Connect software I was up and running pretty much straight away.

Kudos to Vodafone for making the effort to release a Linux version of their connection software.

I’ve been conflicted of late with the newly released 8.8 drivers for ATI cards. I have both an X1950 Pro in my home machine (under Windows XP) and an HD4850 in my work machine, however the 8.8 drivers just refuse to work under 64-bit Linux, no matter how many times I compile them. The 8.7 drivers work fine though, so it’s not a total loss when it comes to getting things like Compiz and the Cairo dock working (and the cylinder deformation looks rather spectacular across two monitors).

However, the 8.8 drivers introduce crossfire support under Linux (OK, so I don’t really need this just yet, but a 3rd monitor could be useful), and also support overclocking of the graphics card. Some of the other bug fixes would be nice, but I can live without them until proper support is forthcoming.

One of my favourite games of the past few years is a game called Beyond Good and Evil. It never got a lot of press, but did garner a dedicated fan base.

Now Ubisoft have revealed they are finally making a sequel, most likely for the Xbox 360, PS3 or both.

Now, if only someone would develop a sequel to Zanzarah…

A story from the games industry popping up today has word of a patented technology that would allow tracking of vehicles in a race, which can then be inserted into a simulation, allowing gamers to participate in real-time with a real-world race.

During the BarrysWorld days, we sponsored a racing car for a while, and one of the conversations we had with the racing team at the time was the possiblity of taking a copy of the car’s real-time data feed and inserting this data into a racing simulation, allowing computer gamers to participate – albeit virtually – in a race as it happened, or to replay a race with perfect accuracy.

Events conspired to prevent this, however the idea was so blindingly obvious I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the idea to gain traction.

The recent release of the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta prompted me to investigate, and run the dist-upgrade. The Gutsy Gibbon beta release and subsequent upgrades was a relatively painless process, and Ubuntu gets better with every release.

Two things that did concern me, as they seem to impact every time I upgrade, were the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and the Broadcom wireless. Luckily, the upgrade took care of the NVIDIA drivers fine (although I haven’t tested out World of Warcraft yet), but as expected the wireless totally failed to work.

A little investigation threw up instructions (also enumerated on other sites) on how to use fw-cutter to install new drivers.

In the interest of documentation, here’s the process I used to re-enable wireless on my Compaq Presario F500 laptop:

Starting in my /home/ directory, I created a Drivers/wireless directory – I always hang on to old drivers just in case.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
mkdir Drivers/wireless
cd Drivers/wireless/
wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta.o

A quick reboot, all was well!

I’m still investigating all the new things in Hardy Heron – so far Firefox 3 is the only thing I’ve really used, and I’m not entirely convinced yet…

Update
Seems that the B43 driver isn’t the best yet, and a rollback to ndiswrapper was in order.

We all like friends, and having the ability to add and remove friends within a social network is critical. How you deal with managing friends from a design point of view is an interesting one.

There are many approaches, depending on the type of information you want to store about the relationships that are created, whether you want to know who initiated the friendship, when it was created, when it was accepted (or rejected even), the type of friendship and so on.

For my little mobile social network, I’m going to use a simplified form of friend relationship tracking, as all I’m interested in is whether or not a relationship exists between two people. To do this, I’m going to use a simple keyless table that holds two values: userID and friendID.

What I am interested in here is whether or not there is a relationship within the table between two user IDs. This tells me whether or not two users are potential friends, or whether a friend request has been made. To do this, I simply enter a row in the database containing a person’s userID, and the userID of the person they wish to befriend. This sets up a one-way relationship in the friends table, indicating that a friendship request has been made. The actual mechanic of processing the friend request I’m going to pass off to the messaging subsystem (which I’ll be covering in another post).

Now that we have a single row in the database, a simple query against a userID will tell me how many ‘friends’ this person has. Of course, this will include all unaccepted friendships, which is not necessarily something we want.

However, this approach works both ways: once a friendship is accepted, a second row is entered in the database with the friend’s userID listed first, and the requestor’s userID listed second. This allows us to write very simple queries to return a complete list of a particular userID’s accepted friends, or a list of a particular userID’s friend requests, since our ‘key’ is the first column in our two column table.

And rejecting a friend request is as simple as removing the original row from the table.

This schema can obviously be expanded to include timestamping should this be needed, or friend type, or anything else really – they key concept here is that what’s of interest is whether or not there is a relationship in the database, not the content of the returned rows (i.e. rowcount = 0, 1 or 2 – this is the information I want).

One of the default screensavers included with Ubuntu 7.10 is one that will display whatever pictures you have saved in your ‘Pictures’ folder (/home/<username>/Pictures). The screensaver will randomly display a picture from this and any subfolders.

However, there’s no way of customsing which folder the screensaver reads if you want to use your Pictures folder to store pictures, but manage which of these images is used.

A workaround is as follows:

• Create a new folder somewhere (it doesn’t have to be under the ‘Pictures’ folder)
• Open a terminal window (select Terminal under Accessories)
• enter the following:

  gksu gedit /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop

  (enter your password if prompted)

• Scroll down to the line (near the end) that begins

  Exec=slideshow

• Add the following after this command:

  --location=<your pictures path>

  (You will have to use standard escape sequences if you have spaces in the path.)

• Here’s an example:

  Exec=slideshow --location=/home/myusername/Pictures/My\\ Screensaver

And that’s it. Save the file, and restart your screensaver. It will now only search for pictures in your chosen folder.

After fiddling about all last night trying to get the laptop to boot, I gave up around 1am and went and played some World of Warcraft. Then just before bed I checked the Ubuntu forums again. A bit of searching for my laptop name and model led me to a thread with some helpful hint, including the suggestion to add

noapic

to the end of the boot command.

This solved all my problems, and let me resolve the issue I had with having to re-compile the NVIDIA driver every time, let me install the restricted drivers and the necessary bits to get the laptop working properly.

There comes a time when the 20Gb partition you set aside on a dual-boot system to run Ubuntu just isn’t big enough, so the idea of upgrading to a spanky new hard drive with a little more room becomes very attractive.

This is a path I started down this afternoon on my Compaq Presario F500, which has proven to not be painless, even with the strides Gutsy has taken in hardware compatibility. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

To do the upgrade, I went out and bought a nice new 120Gb SATA drive, and downloaded a copy of the Gutsy desktop ISO. After installing the new HDD, I rebooted with the Live CD, which promptly failed to load GDM, with the old ‘freeze when switching graphic modes’ bug from Feisty (and Debian 4). Unfortunately, no amount of fiddling about with boot time settings (including the work-around for Feisty, adding ‘vga=792′ to the end of the boot command) resolved this issue.

I managed to boot the Gutsy live CD in safe mode, and also managed to install Gutsy on the new hard drive. However, I still could not boot into GNOME. I rewrote the xorg.conf to match a known, working one (the one posted elsewhere here), and it still wouldn’t boot, insisting on freezing when switching modes, or inly running in low graphics mode. When I did finally manage to get GDM running, networking wasn’t working at all, and I kept getting a strange bug that I eventually tracked down to being something to do with DBUS.

So I took the easy way out and started again, using an Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop CD I had lying around. I used this quite by accident, but it’s proven to be a good thing, as I also had a 7.04 Alternate CD lying around, so once 6.10 was installed, I could do a straight package upgrade from the 7.04 Alternate CD.

This left me with a (mostly!) working system that I’m still twiddling with, although as you can see from this post I am connected to the Internet again. The bcm43xx drivers still blow goats, so I followed a guide on the Ubuntu forums to download and install ndiswrapper and the wireless drivers from Dell (even though I have a Compaq, the wireless chip reports itself as a Dell chip…). Following the instructions step by step, rebooting where indicated, and everythign was up and running and I am now, once more, wireless on the Compaq.

However I still have a major issue with the graphics settings. This laptop has a NVIDIA chip in it, so one of the first things to do is download the latest NVIDIA drivers, and install them. The only problem I have at the moment is that I have to re-compile them every time I want to run X… For some reason, I can compile the drivers, boot into GDM and work properly, but when I reboot, I have to recompile the same driver, overwriting it with the same version. More investigation is needed.

Now, however it’s time to remove this brand new hard drive and put the old one back in. It wasn’t until I went rummaging that I realised my USB harddrive adaptor only wotks with PATA hard drives, not SATA. So to get sll my settings and configuration files from the old hard drive means re-installing it and copying everything to a DVD. Wish me luck!