Tag Archives: ubuntu

May 26 2008
6 Comments
Uncategorized

Ubuntu 8.04 and the Realtek 8185 (Update)

Ok, my last post actually was not completely flawless, that method has been giving me some issues, so I found these instructions instead:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. sudo apt-get install ndisgtk
  3. Download the Windows drivers (I’ve only tested it with the XP drivers)
  4. Open System>Administration>Windows Wireless Drivers
  5. Select the .inf file from the unzipped folder you downloaded in step 3

That method worked perfectly for me, and has lasted through numerous reboots, unlike the previous way. I’ve only tested it with a WPA Personal network, no idea if it works with WEP or WPA2. If it doesn’t work, try rebooting…And you might want to install wpa_supplicant if you’re going to use WPA, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary.

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May 22 2008
3 Comments
Life in general

Ubuntu 8.04 and the Realtek 8185

I have Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) running on Artemis (my desktop), but until a few minutes ago, it had no internet connection, due to lack of drivers for the wifi card in the machine, the Realtek 8185.

I’m used to not knowing how to do anything on Linux, and usually my attempts to make things work on the open source OS end in failure, so it’s pretty cool that I figured out how to get this to work.

First, I found this tutorial [link dead], which I followed word-for-word, with no results at all. Then I checked my chipset on the wifi card, and realized that the article is for the 8187, not the 8185. So I decided to take a leap of faith, and downloaded the Win98 drivers for the 8185 (Win98 because they are the version of the 8187 drivers the tutorial uses), and then followed the tutorial again, but with the new drivers instead of the original ones.

Guess what? It worked. Flawlessly. Artemis now has wifi under Hardy Heron, and I couldn’t be happier. Now for the graphics card and my mouse…

Edit: If this doesn’t work, try this method instead!

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Jul 10 2007
1 Comment
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Ugly Tri-Boot Transforms into Pretty Dual-Boot :D

I used a live ubuntu disk (6.06, 7.10 doesnt work for some reason) to re-install ubuntu (luckily there wasn’t anything important on there…except my plasma server….I let go of my last shreds of UU today…), and then once i got in there i manually edited my boot/grub/menu.lst to remove all the excess entries (the memory tests and the different kernels, i never use them anyway) and add my osx86. I was about to add the XP parition when I realized that I wiped it yesterday…I don’t remember why I did that, but it’s not like it worked anyway.

So now I have a happy dual-boot server chugging down some low-seed torrents for me so i am free to turn off Eve and stuff without worrying about losing data or something. Yay 🙂

Maybe someday I’ll try out windows again, but I don’t know how to make the internet work on it…

(Thanks for your suggestion, LA…I had already done the above stuff when I got your comment ^.^)

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Jul 09 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

Ugly Tri-Boot Situation

So my awesome windows/osx86/ubuntu tri-boot machine I set up many moons ago is now pretty much kaput. Reinstalling XP was a really, really, really bad move, it turns out. It overwrote my hacked GRUB menu, so I could only use XP. Then, to make matters worse, XP somehow lost its ethernet card drivers, so I can’t get to the intertubes from the XP partition. So after 30 days, XP commits seppeku since I never activated it, since I couldn’t activate it, since it couldn’t access the net.

So basically I was stuck with a computer with 3 operating systems installed, but the only one which was accessible was the one which didn’t work. Then I discovered that by putting in the OSx86 disk, I can re-access my OSx partition, and re-bless the hard drive to make OSx the default OS. Now this is an improvement over a broken windows, but what I’m really looking for is the Ubuntu. Actually, I want the GRUB menu back so I can pick whichever I want, but I really have need of ubuntu right now.

So I try re-installing ubuntu. Actually, first I try downloading my torrent via the live image (I’m trying to use it as a torrent server), but it can’t see the ext3 partition on the hard drive for some reason, and it can’t write to ntfs or hfs+, so it tries to write it to the live disk and of course that fails, but first it seeds for an hour and a half before telling me it failed. Whee.

So I go to reinstall GRUB, since I know how to do it in Ubuntu, but after about 5 minutes I remember that I’m in the live disk’s filesystem, not the hard drive, and not only is installing GRUB pointless on a CD, it’s also impossible.

Tomorrow I’m going to try…something. Maybe a hammer would fix it up? This could end with me wiping the hard drive and starting over…If all the OS’s used the same filesystem I wouldn’t encounter these problems, because I could mount the mac or windows partition from linux and write the torrented files to them, or edit the GRUB menu on the linux partition from mac…We should all just use zfs…

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