Free Fedora, Frustration & Fury.

It had been a smooth ride for a long time with Opensuse 10.3. After experiencing the best that the linux community has to offer, I had become confident of finding my way around most day to day issues.

The issue with the Canon 2900 laserjet printer was the starting point for the search for a compatible distro. As a self created rule, this is the only reason to want to try another distro. It is important to not keep changing distros as soon as they are released since this fragments the user base. Also it is possible to incorporate newer kernels (which support newer hardware) without getting the newer distro entirely. This is something I haven't tried yet, though.

My search obviously took the familiar path - Opensuse 11.1. Unfortunately, like the 10.3 version, 11.1 too couldn't print a page, though no errors are reported during the installation or the printing. Just no page comes out!

The next step was Fedora 10. Thanks to the folks at zyxware.com, it is quite easy to get the full fledged DVD at one's doorstep for a nominal cost. In fact, I ordered the Fedora 10 DVD just to average out the shipping costs on shipping the Opensuse 11.1. DVD.

The Fedora experience is a nightmare. The frustrations that I faced as a newbie in the Linux world all came back to me, thanks to fedora. It could be because Opensuse is an excellent distro that Fedora looks uncouth, unpolished and unkempt in comparison. Everything about the distro, from the first page and menu to it's inability to get the resolution right fills one with fury.

Initially seeing the CGA menu I thought, well there is no need to invest resources to make the menu flashy, since it doesn't matter post installation. But, the resources were not invested elsewhere, probably because there were no resources to invest at all!
Part of the blame will need to be laid on the doorstep of KDE 4. An interface that is so retrograde functionally. But, Opensuse offers even KDE3 as an option, Fedora does not. I couldn't see an option to install Wine as well. Post installation, all attempts to get the screen resolution corrected was frustrated - there seems to be no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and running Xorg -configure also fails. And there seems to be no GUI way of getting X reconfigured, only the set resolutions are available as options. In contast the Opensuse 11.1 installation process, and installed environment seems heavenly.

Fedora was removed in a fraction of the time it took to install. It was too frustrating to deal with the mind numbing obtuseness that pervades the interface.

But, considering that people have reported success with getting the 2900 running under Fedora, it may be a bitterest pill I have to swallow.

As easy as GPRS

I have experienced the pains of getting the Nokia 6230 to work as a GPRS modem under XP. And I was prepared for something worse in Linux, partially because there seems to be no readily available drivers to start with.
A lot of clicks with the Modem section in the Admin hardware control got nowhere. Trying the kppp utility also didn't result in anything workable.
Then a little google and I came to this site http://microdotsagamedev.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/usb-mobile-phone-modem-under-linux/ .

What is great about this site is that, unlike the many that are thrown up, the data is offered in the most briefest and clearest manner. The crux of the solution, as mentioned on the site, are these lines (most of which are cut and pasted) :

open /etc/wvdial.conf file as root (use Kate or anyother text editor).
delete everything from the file except the ‘Dialer Defaults’ heading (if there is none add one enclosed with ‘[' and ']‘) and add the following (Phone, Username and Password will be different depending on provider)
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Phone = *99#
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 115200
Dial Attempts = 2
Username = vdata
Password = vdata

Save the file

Plug in your USB data cable ( Phone must be on… snigger :D )
* Exec the following at any point, root or not to establish an internet connection.
sudo wvdial


That's it.

It is hard to believe that all the gui fiddling was needed to effect this change, when it could have been done just this way!!!

Yahelite, yahoo

There are chat clients for directly chatting over the main pm networks - yahoo, msn etc. But, I was in need for a client to chat over the public chat rooms offered by linux.
Previously I had used YAhelite and found it much better than the default, all frill yahoo client. Much like the google search page, yahelite was to spartan and functional. Remembering this, I was surprised to see that Yahelite also offered a linux client. This though was having issues right out of the box. The next solution was to get Yahelite for windows and rely on Wine. Here too, the yahelite site did mention the need to download additional files to be able to use text formatting for using under Linux. But, since all I needed was normal text, I just downloaded the main client. It works beautifully.
It was only after running the windows client that I discovered the issue with the linux one. The captcha image was not being displayed in the latter.