Fedora's back online, but can I install anything else?

Well, I finally discovered the solution for my self-inflicted problem with Fedora failing to go online...  My guess that it was Network Manager was semi-right: the update I chose was a scheduled one that somehow conflicts with the acer-wmi module.  The immediate solution was to log in as root and type

modprobe -r acer_wmi

Once that was done and proved that it worked, I edited the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file to include a line that said "blacklist acer_wmi" so it'll avoid loading in the future.


I also discovered (with some embarrassment) the reason for a serious problem I was having with trying live distros.  Almost all of them (including Gujin, which is more of a boot manager) would boot up to a point, then crash in some manner.  Turns out that even though there's nothing suggesting it on the little sticker, my netbook's processor is 64-bit! 

So I'm downloading Mint Debian Edition 64 right now... I wouldn't do it, but Fedora refusing to let me install Open Office instead of what they want me to use (and their devs' recent Ubuntu-team-like attitude) really annoys me, and working fighting with OpenSuSE's web-based live creator reminded me how much I hate their repository setup.  So over to Debian-based distros (or Debian) I go...

When In Doubt, Switch Distros

So, rebooted Cecil back into Fedora in hope that OpenSuSE 11.3 turning on wifi would fix it...nope.  However, screwing around in the terminal, while iwconfig couldn't get the stupid thing to connnect, dhclient did.

Note I say "connected", not "working".  NetworkManager still insists it's not connected, and all attempts to ping fail.  I know there's a not-impossible way to fix that in the terminal, and since NetworkManager might work once I degrade it to the old version, I guess I have to look into it...

Okay, no, after another hour or so, I got sick of fighting with Fedora and ended up trying out the OpenSuSE-meets-E17 spin Petite Linux. Its creator hasn't quite finished the 11.4 version, so it's running from 11.3 right now -- but it got me online and came with a fully-functional version of OpenOffice.org 3.x.  This also neatly solves the problem of what environment I was going to use since GNOME's moving towards total suckdom.

I need a faster network (and a Windows quote)

Gleargh. So, figuring out that OpenSuSE 11.3 can bring Cecil online kinda-sorta-somewhat handles it for the time being...because if there's anything I've learned from using Linux for three years, it's that what works today will likely break at the next release.  Which means I should download a recent prerelease of 11.4...

In the "making shit up while not throttling my download" department:

Mom: what is with the connection? I had to drop my picture quality all the way down to minimal
Xyzzy: I noticed it was slow too but only on some sites...means the backbone at the border is probably bogged (or normally it would, had I not been downloading a distro at full speed...)
Mom: are you downloading anything?
Xyzzy: I've been mostly playing "hit the wrong key" on the netbook (not quite a lie; I just didn't mention my other system had been downloading)
Mom: I have ben tryng to access some pages, but it is still loading. for about 10 minutes now. not just one, but two separate ones
Xyzzy: could both be in places that go through that backbone (she replied, whistling innocently)

Yes, she believed me.  Knowledge is power (or download speed and power over which computers get network priority, at least)... Also, from an Arch forum I ran across in my quest to fix Cecil:

"Got myself an Acer Aspire One 721 yesterday, booted it up, laughed hard at the Win7 Home Premium that was preinstalled and dumped it..."

Now it's working, now it's not

I'm starting to think the netbook is cursed or something.  I've discovered, first, that despite being listed as 11.6" it doesn't fit in 11.6" cases...and 12" cases are about three inches too big. 

More infuriatingly, my own screwing around has caused a deeply strange wifi problem.  I was annoyed at having to try repeatedly to bring wifi up, and updated NetworkManager...which promptly placed a block on wlan0 that I can't lift in Linux.  Of course the block doesn't appear to exist in Windows.

So far, I've tried booting other/older distros via USB to see if their NetworkManager/Wicd could control it (nope), then installed & asked rfkill to "unblock" it.  I now know from experimenting that the Fn+F3 combo controls a hard block on phy0, but that acer-wireless has a soft block that won't go the eff away.

Edit: evidently OpenSuSE 11.3 will lift it. That makes even less sense, but if it works, I'm installing it: I want to explore Linux when I feel like it, not when major components fucking break.

LibreOffice won't recognize the existence of its dictionary (I've tried more things than I can keep track of to fix THAT problem) and I can't get OpenOffice of any version to install.  Since that's not enough, while typing in hand-edited changes to my writing, I've noticed the computer copies don't match the printouts, plus a good quarter of them have inexplicably lost all text formatting.

Is this a gift or a curse [Edit: It Works!]

Evidently my brother got fed up with hearing about my various failing computers -- ages 6, 10 and 11 -- because to my shock, when I came home from seeing the Wavy Gravy Movie with Dad & his partner, there was an Acer Aspire One 721 here for me.  It's currently being used to stream old Grateful Dead videos for me, because...

...so far, the three Linux installers and Gparted on its own have all been unable to resize the hard drive partitions, which is required to install Linux. [Edit: Working OK now, see next post.]  Fedora 13 & 14 yell "FIRMWARE BUG" at liveboot, which evidently never happens with netbooks other than the AO721 (lucky me).  Fedora and OpenSuSE refuse to boot off USB keydrives created by my Averatec (only option at the moment).

I'm learning that I still don't care much for Windows, but that for some reason, it's able to connect to my wifi router -- Linux has recently been forcing me to type in the IP, DNS servers, gateway, etc. and I don't know why.  I can't think of anything redeeming to say about Firefox 4, which I've avoided in Linux thus far as 3.6 has mercifully been the default on my preferred distros.

Better get back to figuring this thing out (after some aspirin for the headache the netbook or frustration has caused both days thus far).

QuickiWiki Look Up

Nooo, not my monitor!

When I was using Fedora, one of the more bizarre issues that started cropping up is that when -- and only when -- it was left unattended for several hours, my external/only monitor would shut off and refuse to come back on for several minutes.  The power light would flicker for about two seconds when I asked it to turn on, and my sharp (likely autistic-linked) ears could hear all kinds of weird (and now predictable) electrical fluctuations, but no picture.  Turning the screensaver off, turning it on, changing it, etc. didn't help.

I switched back to OpenSuSE, left it overnight, and to my shock, the monitor was still on the next morning.  I figured that I'd just solved the problem, saving me the very real possibility of having a dead monitor, especially since I can't afford a new one and don't know how to fix it yet. That is, until today, when I found the monitor in "sleep" state and it shut itself off for several minutes when I moved the mouse to bring it back up. This is really frustrating -- there's a ton of non-optional expenses in the next few months (and I don't mean presents), and this was the second Westinghouse to pull this on me in a row.  Bleep Westinghouse.


Time to do some serious research on fixing LCD monitor power issues, I guess.  Well, I had planned on learning how to fix electronics via soldering iron sometime, and I'll be thrilled for a week if I pull it off!!

OpenSuSE, Fedora, argh

I wrote quite a while back that I'd settled in OpenSuSE 11.3 Linux, and was extremely happy with it.  Well, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but a couple of months or so ago, a stupid mistake on my part updated it to 11.4 Alpha, breaking my ability to run a huge number of programs and generally making me unhappy.

So, after a lot of frustration one day, I decided to try something else entirely: Fedora 13.  Aside from some initial hassle, and a few things I hadn't managed to puzzle out yet, that went quite well, enough that I recommended it to a fellow novice.  So I was quite pleased when it turned out that, hey, Fedora 14 was out!

I used the little updater that runs in the background, then does its magic after a reboot.  The next morning, I merrily rebooted the computer...and was told I didn't have enough disk space -- but not which partition it wanted space on.  It also, as I soon learned, did something so I couldn't boot into the still-untouched 13; fixing the free space issue didn't help.  Meanwhile, the Fedora 14 Live CD I'd downloaded for kicks inexplicably makes the screen go blank after filling the "F" logo in.

So much for that idea. I didn't know how to fix 13, or if it could be fixed, so I put the OpenSuSE GNOME 11.3 live CD in -- and installed that instead.  I'm typing from it now, noticing the interesting mix of things it does better than Fedora & things Fedora definitely has a huge lead in.  I can't figure out for the life of me how I got their bizarre problem with Firefox's failure to respect the font hinting settings (a non-issue in Fedora) fixed last time, and the solutions I've found/tried aren't the one I used last time.

It's at times like this that I actually do understand claims that Linux will never conquer the desktop, or why Ubuntu is ahead (though it has the same stupid Firefox font issue, they also have a ready-made fix). Arrgh.  Maybe I'll just find a fix so Fedora 13 will boot, or the way to forcefully reverse the screwed-up "upgrade" from OpenSuSE 11.3->11.4alpha, since both installations are still sitting peacefully in their own partitions on my drive...

The Dreaded SuSE Connection Failure

I went down to my computer this evening to discover that clicking the mouse no longer did anything, rebooted...and found myself saddled with an infuriating bug a few SuSE (and possibly other distro) users have been encountering.  In it, the wireless adapter can see other routers, but attempting to actually connect to them basically stalls out and fails. Same happened no matter whether I told it to use Network Manager or the traditional ifup approach.

I remembered that much of the problem is that SuSE forgets that it's supposed to access the network through a router. I looked up the "route" commands in the must-own Linux Phrasebook, and managed to at least connect to the router this way:
ifdown eth1 && ifup eth1
route add -net default gw my-router's-IP-here dev eth1

That let me access things that use an IP, like most Internet radio stations, but it didn't let me access anything that required a site name.  Well, at least now I didn't have to drain the batteries on my iRiver H10 to have something to listen to...

I returned to the proverbial drawing board and opened the YaST Network Settings, which I experimented with for a painfully long time.  Arrgh. Eventually, I discovered that I could get online with these settings -- each boldfaced & underlined area is a tab in Network Settings, italics is the name of something to change:
Global Options: Network Setup Method is Traditional
Overview: click on Edit for your adapter, go to the Address tab:
Choose "Statically assigned IP Address"
IP Address: 192.168.1.9, Subnet Mask: /24, Hostname: your pick
Click Next to get to Wireless Device Settings, click "Expert". Set Access Point to your router's name, Power Management: off, AP ScanMode 2. Click "OK", then "Next".
Hostname/DNS: Hostname & Domain: your pick, Name Server 1: your router's IP**
Routing: Default IPv4 Gateway: your router's IP, Device: -, Enable IP Forwarding ON

**If you don't know your router's IP, it almost certainly begins with 192.168.1 and after another period, has either a 0 or a 1.  If one doesn't work, try the other!

I'm sure that some (possibly most) of the settings I've specified have nothing to do with fixing the problem, but those are the certainly-not-default ones I altered.  Hopefully this will help somebody else frantically searching the web for help through another computer/distro, since I didn't find a whole lot that was useful last I looked.

New Template, new distro

I just logged in primarily so I could post a link to some files that I bundled up the other day, mostly so I can find them again in the future (but also to save others the trouble in the future)... I installed OpenSUSE on Mom's computer, having fallen for it myself, and then, since the wifi adapter she was using was bombing out, I added a Netgear WPN111 USB wireless G on for her.  As it turns out, the darn thing needs ndiswrapper, which in turn required driver files...which weren't available on the install CD or shared on the web anywhere. Only way to get them was to run the setup in WINE (or Windows) and copy them myself. Meh.  So, for future reference, I shared the files here.

So, I logged in, as I said, and discovered that there's this fancy new "template designer" for Blogger.  I flipped through the various options, unsure what to go with...until I encountered this brightly-colored tye-dye theme. A few minutes of customizing text colors later, I had a much more individualistic blog -- a huge improvement, if you ask me, over the blah generic green thing I'd been stuck with.

Oh, and now I just need to figure out how the heck to solve ONE small problem in OpenSUSE... For some reason, at random times the first 2 keys I type don't register visibly, and the following one comes out accented. I've tried disabling the control key (or whatever it's called) that normally does that, but no luck so far.

OpenSUSE, Nautilus' location bar fix

Well, after having a few too many problems with GNOME within the otherwise-awesome SimplyMEPIS, I ended up switching distros yet again... After a lot of research & trials, I ended up settling on OpenSUSE, which runs faster & cooler than any other distro has on this computer by a longshot. Its version of Nautilus also offers both tabs and an extra pane for working with files, which should come in really handy.

I heard earlier this year that the "new look" for Nautilus, mostly available through custom designs, was an overly-minimalistic (aka "let's blindly mimic OS X") approach that disables the text-based location bar without giving any visible way of turning it back on. OpenSUSE seems to come with the latest of everything, and sure enough, the change was there. BLEAH.

Thankfully, a quick web-search has shown me how to fix it... First, you can use control-L to switch quickly from text-based to buttons... If you want it to always start up with text, start the GNOME Configuration Editor, go into the /Apps/Nautilus/Preferences area, scroll down to Always Use Location Entry, then set it to true.

Voila, no more clicking to get everywhere, which is a huge improvement for those of us that can touch-type rapidly & have a variety of folders/drives active. If they're all within a home directory, clicking is easy -- but if you have a large organized folder hierarchy, it won't. (Do the people that prefer the buttons-only approach not know how to type, or just throw everything into a few directories? Enquiring minds want to know...)