spittingwalrus

Hello, world!

After a lingering problem with my nVidia drivers under Debian sid, I decided to give Ubuntu a go and see if I could spare myself the fun of having to build packages myself.

I know what you’re thinking: “But Andrew, that’s like giving up Stravinsky in favor of whatever shit-pop* is playing on the radio!” And I know that real men tough it out with the nouveau driver instead of binary blobs. Well, what can I say other than that I’m a corporate girly-man! And let’s face it, it’s more like giving up Schönberg** for Liszt.

So anyway, after reading their site, I was expecting some sort of utopian paradise of user-friendliness to erupt from my drive when I put the Ubuntu Jaunty disc in. In retrospect, those were pretty lofty expectations, but what I did get was a super-easy GNU/Linux install that was only “complicated” by the fact that I’ve got my boot drive partitioned eight ways from Sunday. It would seem Ubuntu went in prepared for this kind of nonsense, because what I thought would be a deathblow to any pretenses of ease of use was effortlessly countered by the partition utility in the installer.

After about 10 minutes, the installation finished without a hitch, and I was just about to wake up everyone I know with the good news that the future had arrived when I tried to get my wireless connection up and running and something totally unexpected happened: kernel panic! Whaaaaat?!

I should mention at this point that I’m using a D-Link DWA-547, which isn’t the best supported wireless NIC under Linux out there. Fortunately, I had a really long ethernet cable stashed away that was just long enough to get to my router while still managing to trip anyone foolish enough to cross its path, so I hooked that sucker up and went out looking for some answers.

Help came in the form of a set of wireless driver updates known as compat-wireless, brought to you by the good folks at kernel.org. Installing it was as easy as downloading the source, unpacking it, and typing the following:

make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo modprobe ath9k

This solved things right off, and after getting KDE 4.2 and the rest of the things installed I can’t live without, I was on my wireless merry way! As much as I liked tinkering with my Debian unstable/experimental mix, I’m hoping this Ubuntu business will bring with it an element of stability that will let me focus more on getting everything else done.

So there you have it. I guess the only thing we can do now is sit back and see how long it takes for me to find something to break!

* or even worse, BrokeNcyde, which I was recently exposed to while reading the gossip column over at buddyhead.com
** I feel comfortable drawing this comparison since a large chunk of what I had installed came from the experimental repositories, and Ubuntu is still GNU/Linux!