Webs’ Random Ideas

Well Linux has arived and it is speeding away on my laptop. In fact this post is coming from Firefox on my new Kubuntu system on my laptop. I just got done installing the AMD64bit version of Kubuntu. And man is it fast. While I do have a gig of memory and a newer Turion 35ml CPU, Windoze still took a good minute, at least to boot. This new Linux system takes a whole whopping 30 seconds. And I am sure if I wanted to tweak it I could bring it down from there.

The hardest part about it was getting the wireless to work. I had two major things working against me.
1. My laptop just happens to have the famed Broadcom 4318 wireless card which is notorious for not playing well with Linux
2. I am using a 64bit Linux OS to take advantage of my CPU
And the first problem hates the second. In other words, I would have been incredibly easy to get the wireless working on the 32bit OS. But I have a NEED FOR SPEED, so I worked through the issues.

To solve the first issue I found this link: Ubuntu Forum - HOWTO: Broadcom 4318 Wireless Cards. In solving the issue I found the second issue wasn’t as big as a problem as I first thought. The only hindrance here is getting an applet to show up in the system tray so I can easily select wireless networks. To solve this issue, until a better solution comes along, I added the Wireless Assistant (wlassistant) to the system tray.

So back to the first issue, I pretty much just followed the directions in the first post and it worked. I had to try a couple other things from the first 5 pages or so, but I pretty much was up and going after that point. I took me longer than it should have only because I wanted the applet functionality.

All in all, I am really happy with everything. I haven’t had a single crash yet. However, I have had a couple programs lock up, but I think I was trying to do too much and just confused the system. At this point things are running perfect. I also got GAIM installed and installed an addon to make the smileys more like the MSN smileys. This can be done by going to this link: HOWTO: MSN Smilies for all GAIM protocols.

The only other thing I want to work on next is getting Beryl to work. I haven’t started this yet, and for those of you that haven’t heard about Beryl, go to YouTube and look it up. Some of the things you can do with it are just insane. Here is the main website for Beryl. Keep in mind, the Beryl website is only showing a very brief glimpse of what Beryl can do.

That’s all for now, but I will keep ya’all posted…