At last I was able to get a new monitor. Well, it’s not totally new since I bought it from an officemate whow wants to get a bigger monitor. It’s still in “brand new” state (only used for a few months with care).

Set it up last Saturday and everything was fine. I can now do pending jobs I have to finish.

Next stop… get a new processor, mobo and memory…

I was able to replace som major parts of our home desktop. We used to have an AMD Duron 800mhz with “64kb L2 Cache” (overclocked to 1ghz), 8mb Nvidia tnt2 agp video card, 512 mb memory, 160gb HDD. I was able to get a new motherboard (intel chipset), processor (Intel Pentium III 800mhz) and a 256mb ATI Radeon 9600 agp video card.

I was able to reinstall Windows XP without any problems, downloaded drivers for the video card. Was up and running in 2 hours.

Well, I am a bit of a fan of Ubuntu. So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the system. Installation went smooth. But when it comes to video card configuration, it was a headache. When I enabled the restricted drivers (closed-source drivers for linux), my monior goes to sleep mode. Tried a few howtos, and failed. Reinstalled Ubuntu to get it clean. It took me almost 3 days (though I’m just working on that for at least 3 hours a day) before I decided to install the drivers that came from ati’s website. And alas, it’s working now.

I was able to configure compiz-fusion (eye-candy of Ubuntu). I haven’t yet checked the 3D rendering on the OS.

Here’s a sample of my desktop with the “cube” effect:

Well, have some things to work on still (TV-out both for XP and Ubuntu). And properly install my Canon Pixma IP1200 printer on Ubuntu (which I think will be impossible, but it’s still worth a try).

With the near end of Windows XP support, and my system not capable of running Vista, and me not having enough budget to buy a new system, I am planning to go to a switch to Ubuntu. Just have to configure the printer and also the desktop to look like XP so my wife could easily adapt to it.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues asked me to help her setup their home network. The have a desktop (Windows XP), a Toshiba laptop (Windows Vista Basic), PLDT DSL, and Linksys wrt54g.

I was able to setup the router to dial the DSL modem (Alcatel modem) via PPPoE. Setup of the wired connection (for the desktop) was a breeze. Was able to surf the internet in seconds.

Setup of the wireless (for the router side) is not problem. But when I got to the laptop (running Vista Basic), It wasn’t detecting the wireless signal.

I am not familiar in setting up wireless connection for Vista. My first encounter with Vista wi-fi setup was with my brother-in-law’s Acer laptop (also Vista Basic). I find it very hard to configure (that was in our home network where in I am no having problem connecting a Latitude D620 running on Windows XP wirelessly) and whenever I got a connection, when I restart the Vista laptop, it can’t pick up my home wi-fi anymore, so I have to manually configure that again.

My wireless setup was this. Router’s SSID is hidden, WPA2 Personal, AES.

On the acer laptop, I was able to connect by disabling the proxy settings on IE and Firefox (maybe set by the seminary for their wifi). But still, when restarted, connection won’t come back.

On the toshiba laptop, it was totally head-busting. Even after configuring the wireless signal manually, it won’t connect. I can’t detect the wireless signal for the first 30 minutes. It detected it after I manually configured it (un named network protected). However, it still shows that it is disconnected. It was able to detect the wireless signal of a nearby net cafe (SSID not hidden) as soon as the laptop is turned on, but as for the Linksys router, it won’t.

I tried changing broadcast channel but still no go. Went to unprotected network but still no go. I discovered that the laptop was set to a static IP. I changed it to automatically acquire IP and I thought that would solve the problem. But still, can’t connect. I tried restarting everything but still no go.

I was about to go to online chat with Linksys when I tried to enable the broadcast of the router’s SSID. I restarted everything (modem, router, laptop, desktop). And boom, the Vista was able to detect the Linsys router immediately. It was able to connect to the router and the internet after entering the passkey.

I restarted everything again and it is working fine now.

So, I did a research. this site brought me some intriguing answer. It says that hidden SSID is a bad wireless security measure (against the common knowledge that hiding your SSID will add security to your wi-fi network). And it also says that I should enable “Connect even if the network is not broadcasting” option on the wireless network setup so I can connect to a hidden SSID (which I thought it was refering to connecting even if the router is not broadcasting “wi-fi signal” not the SSID).

The author is a tech from MS itself. And there were actual research that hiding SSID for security was a myth. And it is actually a violation of 802.11i specifications and guidelines when you hide your access point’s SSID. As for my part.

I also thought about that (hiding SSID a security myth). But I don’t know why I still applied that to the networks I setup. I have never encountered problems with that before (XP, Ubuntu) only on Vista. Well, maybe, I’ll change the way I wireless network now. I’ll let the router/access point broadcast its SSID to avoid problems, breaking standards and stop believing in myhts :).

“The old axiom remains true: security by obscurity is no security at all”

During the writing of my previous article, the Ubuntu website is not yet updated. Meaning it doesn’t have any info regarding the release of Hardy Heron (but rather the Release Candidate only). Now, the website is updated and information regarding Hardy Heron can be seen (click here).

I am currently downloading Xubuntu 8.04, Which is basically the same with Ubuntu, but only differs primarily with the Window Manager and some other softwares. It is lighter (in terms of graphics) than Ubuntu (which uses Gnome, Xubuntu uses Xfce).

Cheers…

Ubuntu, one of the popular Linux distribution (ubuntu.com), has just released its latest version “Hardy Heron” (8.04). Ubuntu is designed to be “free” (you can download for free or request for a CD with free shipping virtually to any country, which is good for those with slow or no internet connection). It is also pre-installed with softwares that is basically needed by a user (office productivity suite, photo editing, internet and mail, video and audio player. system management, networking tools, and more.). And other softwares are readily available from the Ubuntu Repository (can be installed with just a few clicks).

This release of Ubuntu has many improvements from the latest core products it has to how the OS and its software communicates to its users.. And best of all, it has “Long Term Support”, meaning updates and support is available up to April 2013 for server edition and April 2011 for desktop edition.

You can check for more information from their website and download it here (via download or free/paid shipping). BitTorrents are also available for hassle free downloading (click here).

Though we can start upgrading/installing now, I will wait up to one month before installation so the “final” bugs can be cleaned. And also, the servers are “very busy” right now.

Cheers….