Calcalute Linux Desktop 12 KDE - Keep It Rolling, Baby

Well, I wasn't going to do any reviews until later this year, but several of a recent flurry of releases caught my attention and my  interest and I made some time for checking them out. One of them is Calculate Linux. Others have reviewed it before and found themselves inundated with offers of Russian brides and other more vile advertisements, but I won't let that put me off because, as I can reveal, I like the product itself very much.

Broadcom Wireless and Slackware 14

Broadcom wifi in Linux distributions still seems to be an ongoing issue and a moving target. There are several ways to get this to work depending on the chip set you got, and even several ways for the same one, so everybody will have to decide for themselves how they want it. You can check out the PCI-ID (the one that shows up when running the lspci command) and the Chip ID on linuxwireless.org and see what is supported.

My Favorite Distribution Releases 2010-2011

I was going to write about how I finally dumped Firefox for Opera, but Firefox 8 does not seem too bad and for the first time appears a bit nippier at start up. Like Dedoimedo has found, this does not look like a completely arbitrary decision to pump up the version number but actually has some small benefits, so I'm going to give Firefox another chance before it is relegated.

Arch Linux: The Big Upgrade

I've been putting it of and been running with linux 2.6.39 for months, but today it was time and the big upgrade went surprisingly well. Basically, I have not been updating this machine since I wrote the ArchBang article in July. After downloading around 420 MB in package updates (more than 2 GB installed size) two days ago it pulled in another ~90 meg today.

Slackware 13.37 - Perfect for My Laptop

Most people who have dabbled in Linux for a while "know" that Slackware is difficult to install, configure, make work and keep up to date. It is an OS only for geeks. Not so. These days the developments in the wider universe have trickled down to Slackware as well, and having something like KDE 4 as default desktop already means plenty of things taken care of, with all the utilities and options this desktop environment is providing.

How to Enable Broadcom Wireless on Slackware 13.37

This one has got a lot easier over the last releases. There is now a build script on slackbuilds.org that allows you to build a package with the latest driver from staging as kernel module. Choose the first one on the list, unless you want to mess around with fwcutter. I don't, and I always found broadcom-sta to work perfectly for me in Slackware and Arch. It's different in Debian and related distros though where it's called brcm80211. This package supports chipsets including but not limited to BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322. Mine is a BCM43225.

How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Scientific Linux 5.5

This one is a bit more involved than getting Broadcom wireless support in Fedora 14, but not that hard either. It should also be valid for CentOS 5.

First of all, if you haven't already done so, ugrade to the latest kernel, at present 2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 .

First you will have to add the EPEL repository because when getting the relevant broadcom packages they rely on this to be enabled for dependency resolution.
EPEL provides add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x and 4.x releases and compatible derivatives (and also for 6.x in view of the upcoming release). EPEL packages are in most cases built or derived from the equivalent ones in Fedora repository and maintained by the same people. You can read more about the whole project here to find out more about the quality of packages etc, or just skip ahead to add the repository.

Currently, what you want is this command:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm'

Enter it into a terminal and hit enter. Yes, epel-release-5-4 is correct, there is no 5.5 yet.

Then in Yum Extender or whatever your package manager of choice in Scientific Linux you should already have the Atrpms repository listed. Enable it and the EPEL one and refresh the package listing. Make sure you're looking at available packages through the filter, not updates or installed. Search for broadcom and the correct packages available for your architecture should show up.

Choose broadcom-wl and one of the available kernel modules and install, chances are you want the first  

broadcom-wl-kmdl-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 kernel modules for the Linux kernel package:

kernel-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5.x86_64.rpm

and not the centos.plus or xen ones.

Reboot, see your new interface detected, enter your credentials into the NetworkManager applet and be online wirelessly! The connection will probably be a bit slower than in Fedora 14.

I installed SL 5.5 a few weeks ago on this laptop to see how it would fare, but there seems to be no guide like this around, only half finished threads and recommendations to use ndiswrapper, which for some reason did not work for me. Setting this up in Fedora got me thinking and it wasn't more than a few minutes after that I had set it up in Scientific Linux as well.

Did others before figure this all out on their own? Going by some threads, not everybody did.

In SL/RHEL/CentOS 6 it shall be more straight forward, probably more like in recent Fedora releases (I hope).

How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Fedora 14

This one is easy, I've never had to do so little fiddling and searching:

Go to http://rpmfusion.org/ and add both the free and the non-free repositories unless the latter one is against your philosophical stance.

You can do this via graphical setup, installing a small rpm file that will set this up for you, or at the command line where you can basically just copy the commands into your terminal (you have to become root for this).

Update your repositories and install all updates prior to proceeding.

Search for broadcom-wl, install the package and reboot.

Voila, there you are. Enter network credentials into NetworkManager or Wicd if you prefer that and you're online. It's never been easier.

And here you can find the respective page on the fedora community website, with links to more wireless solutions.

Experiencing Arch Linux with the ArchBang Live CD

So I got my new laptop ready for some hardcore multi-boot action, and one of the distributions I’ve always wanted to test is ArchBang. I’ve tried Arch before and installed it a couple of times just for fun, both in a virtual environment and on disk, but haven’t been serious about it. It was just to practice the installation and play around.

A couple of months back ArchBang caught my eye, when it was first announced on Distrowatch.com. ArchBang is a live CD distribution of Arch Linux that is light on resources. Arch is known to apply no to, and only if absolutely necessary, minimal patching to upstream software, which usually results in a high degree of stability and an experience as intended by the developers.

How to get Ralink 2870 wireless USB adapter working in SalixOS/Slackware-13.1

This one has taken me quite a while to find out, with bits of information here and there. Two steps only:

Blacklist rt2800usb in your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, preferably with an explanatory comment to yourself why, or at least something like #My own blacklist starts here

blacklist rt2800usb

 Then at least one place recommends to add this line to the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file

iwconfig wlan0 power off

I'm not really sure the second is required but had done it before blacklisting the module, and it works. Check for yourself if it works for you without the second entry.

That's it. Glad I finally finished a complete system upgrade without reinstalling. It's all 13.1 now and sound, video acceleration, wireless all work.

Take care.