Linux Mint Working on Gateway T1616

The idea of the Ubuntu - Based distro Linux Mint is to make things work easier. But for the users of linux-unfriendly Gateway T1616 users, which includes me, things are always a little more complicated than it suppose to be. And Linux Mint is not an exception. Here's how I made this distro work to meet my basic requirements.

1. Video Card This turned out to be the easiest step. After the installation, there was a notification on the taskbar asking me to use a restricted dirver. I checked that driver and Linux Mint downloaded and installed the ATI accelerated graphics driver automatically. After this, I rebooted the laptop and got the video card working perfectly.
2. Wireless Card As I've wrote in another post, I download RTL8187B driver for Windows, unpack it. There were the rtl8187b driver for windows 98 as well as other windows versions on their own folder. I went to Daryna-Administrations-Windows Wireless Drivers , Clicked "Install", found the .ini file in the folder for the rtl8187b driver of windows 98, clicked OK. Then the wireless card started working. One thing to recommend is, the default network-manager in Linux Mint (Ubuntu) is a little dull in detecting the wireless signals. Usually it doesn't match the result of "lwlist scan". And wicd is the solution. Go to Daryna-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Choose Settings-Repositories, press the button New. Fill in the text area like this: URL: http://apt.wicd.net/ Distribution: gutsy Section(s): extras And then press OK. And you will be able to install wicd with synaptic (sudo aptitude install wicd). When you do that, you'll find network-manager removed automatically. Don't panic, you can install it back whenever you like. To finish the installation of wicd, you need to go to Daryna-Preference-Sessions, Press Add, Fill in name with Wicd, Command with /opt/wicd/tray.py, and fill in Comment with anything you like. Next time you start gnome, you will find wicd in the taskbar at start.
3. Sound Card It took me quite a while to search with Google, and the result is unexpectedly simple. All you need is type the following command in a terminal:

   sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic

   I doubt that this works with Ubuntu , too.
4. Webcam For the scarce of webcam application on linux, I haven't found a universal way to fully drive the built-in webcam up. But it works properly for skype 2.0 by default. Which, according to my previous test on Ubuntu, indicates that it works with kopete, too.

Having all this done, I've got this laptop working with Linux Mint. But there's still a problem. Sometime when restarted, the system stops in the middle of the whole process forever. To "restart" it, I need to turn the machine down and start it again. Do you have the same problem with Linux Mint & Gateway T1616?

Linux Mint 4.0 + ndiswrapper works on Gateway T1616: rtl8187b

This is an instruction to new Linux Mint users who have a Gateway T1616 Laptop, if you are using Ubuntu and the wireless doesn't work, you may want to try Native Linux Driver for RTL8187B. "Linux Mint is an Ubuntu - based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories." Gateway T1616, which is not a very linux-friendly laptop, has the wireless card RTL8187b. I found that it is very easy to make the wireless work out of the box with Linux Mint 4.0 . First, you need to download the RTL8187B driver for Windows. Notice that there are several drivers in the package, and the one for windows 98 works just fine. So uncompress that to some where on the disk. Then you install the driver with ndiswrapper, which is in the system by default. To be specific, go to Daryna-Administrations-Windows Wireless Drivers. Click on "Install" button, choose the path where you unpacked the Win98 driver, and you will find the .inf file highlighted, click OK. Now you should have the wireless working properly. If there are wireless signals around, you should be able to find them listed by clicking the network reminder on the right of the taskbar. You may also try iwconfig in a terminal and you should find wlan0 up and running. The last thing to do is to add ndiswrapper to a new line in the start-up module list, which is in /etc/modules And that's when you start enjoying wireless.

Failed to say hi to baidu hi

Baidu, the top search engine in China, just released its first Instant Message Tool "Baidu Hi". The interface is a mixture of Gtalk, MSN and the most popular Chinese IM tool Tencent QQ. This testing version only runs on windows/vista system. Though strongly suggested by users, there's still no official information about the future release of *nix version. This edition does not even use UTF-8 or other international Unicode standard, which is the reason why it will be just a mess if you try to install it with wine.

QQ.NET preview released :)

Good news for QQ users/developers: the era of .NET-QQ-hacking has come to its threshold. Not surprisingly, the official notice is in Chinese: http://www.cnblogs.com/hjf1223/archive/2008/03/13/qq_net_FCTP.html Based on LumaQQ, QQ.NET is an OpenSource project written in C#. Why not Java? Because LumaQQ is written in Java. And you can take advantage of it by using MONO, anyway. The source and documentation is available at: http://qqnet.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ Here's a sample code from the releasing note. Its function is to login QQ:

QQUser user = new QQUser(****, "****"); QQ.NET.QQClient client = new QQ.NET.QQClient(user); user.IsUdp = true; client.LoginServerHost = "219.133.62.8"; client.Login();

There are still some limitation. Details are available at the releasing notes and documentation.

Ruby VS Python: The discussion

It turned out that the discussion about ruby & python is quite big nowadays. And here is a deep talk about them, before you click on it, I should warn you that it is VERY LONG : http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1480 And there's even a meeting in Europe called RuPy Have fun programming, everybody!

Getting my Google Analytics back

The traffic report from Google analytics had been 0 almost a week before I found out the reason. The thing is, days ago, when I was moving part of the content in the old sidebar into the new one, all code within that part got accidentally deleted, and I had not back up any thing (oops..). I got them back little by little and finally get the page back to this original look. That's the beginning of the story, I totally forgot about the tracking code for analytics. And, not so excitingly, here's the end of this story: I went back to Google analytics, log in. In the "Website Profiles" table appeared on the first page, I clicked on "edit" for this site in column "settings". In the next page, it saids "Receiving Data" on the top right, which is, say, not true. I clicked on "Check Status". There appeared the status info and below is "Instructions for adding tracking", I found the "New Tracking Code (ga.js). Then the code is added back to this blog, which means, hopefully, Google Analytics should give me a proper report tomorrow.

Learning Perl, 4th Edition Notes 0x9

Learning Perl, 4th Edition Notes 0x9 by DaNmarner * Compared to the traditional if control structure, unless works in the opposite way, which is equal to if (!condition) {} , else is conditional in this structure. * until structure function as while (!condition ) * if, unless, while, until, foreach can be used as expression modifiers. Thus, a statement can be written in reverse. The limitation for this is, only one expression is allowed on either side of the modifiers. * elsif equals to "else if" in if structure. * Autoincrement/decrement operator (++,--) is the same as them in C. * for loop, like in C, is available in perl, too. * last, as "break" in C, stops the loop's execution. Similarly, next ends the current iteration. * redo repeats current iteration in a loop. * last, next and redo can work with lables to effect the outer loop. The syntax is, say, when used in a while loop nested in a unless loop:

LABLENAME: unless { while { redo LABLENAME; } }

* The value of logical operator "&&" and "||" is the last evaluated part. And they could be written in words ("and", "or"). * The ternary operator (?:), as it in C, is availble in perl.