Frustrations
Well, this weekend has been an interesting one. I finished school on the friday, ate pizza and watched Wall-E. On the Saturday, me and Joe went to Lugradio Live, which was really cool. Now you may wonder what either of these things has to do with the title of my blog post, well not much. There were a couple of minor annoyances with lugradio live, such as the fact I only went for one day 
and I didn’t manage to meet up with Fred.
However, the main topic of this blog post is about my frustration with my computer setup. Firstly, something that has been annoying me for a while know. Being quite a novice to the insides of computers, I managed to snap off part of my SATA hard drive data cable, so the connection is loose, and I have to constanly stick it down with tape (which only works so well). Soo, if anyone in the Manchester area has a spare sata cable…… otherwise, I may end up buying one from amazon.
The other annoyance is wireless. I did have both my computers networking working perfectly fine with ubuntu, but I hope to switch to gnewsense, and both computers have freedom hating network cards. One is plugged directly into the router downstairs, but the ethernet card requires non-free firmware; the other, a desktop upstairs, is connected via wireless (and is some distance from the router) – the wireless card, of coures, also required firmware.
So, I bought a Linksys WUSB54G, a usb card that seemed to be highly recommend by the FSF. And yes, it did work with gnewsense, didn’t require any firmware, but its wireless capabilities are quite frankly crap. It is not usable upstairs. With a lot of palaver I managed to get it working in one minute bursts, but only with WPA turned off. Now, AFAICT, neither of these problems are due to the drivers, since it works fine on my downstairs computer, when right next to the router. This is useful to an extent, since it allows me to use gnewsense, despite the non-free ethernet, but I had hoped to be able to use the linksys card on both computers.
So, I don’t know what to do, I hoped to try to use 100% free software for a certain length of time, but at the moment, I still need 24576 characters of non-free firmware for my freedom hating wireless card. Is there anything I can do to improve the reception of the linksys one? Solder a new antenna on? baked bean cans?… has anyone got any ideas?
*sigh*
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22 July 2008, 6:06 pmArielEnter:
Hi. I had the same problem the first time I installed gNewSense and I think that the problem is that gNewSense 2.3 kernel is kind of old now, and does not posses the newest drivers for this card. The people from gNewSese suggest the use of Linux libre, which is a totally free kernel which is newer than the one that comes with gNewSense. You can download precompile packages from the following page http://aligunduz.org/gNewSense/. You have to install both linux-image and linux-headers. I sure that the next version of gNewSense won’t have this problem and they will be using the Linux libre kernels. I also made this wiki: http://wiki.gnewsense.org/UserExperiences/HowToWUSB54G
9 August 2010, 7:56 pmI sorry to heard you had this problem in your first incursion in the free software world. Hope you didn’t give up. See you.
Ben Webb:
@ArielEnter: I’m currently using Arch Linux with a standard Linux kernel, but all the applications I use are free software. I appreciate what distributions like gNewSense are trying to do by being 100% free software, but personally I don’t see why small binary firmware blobs in the kernel are any worse than small binary blobs on ROM chips in hardware devices (which the FSF seems fine with). In fact, I would suggest it is preferable, since it is technically possible to modify software firmware, whilst for hardware blobs, it is not.
The other issue with gnewsense is that it has not had a major release for 2 years, compared to Ubuntu’s 6 months (which in fact I switched away from in favour of rolling release). However, that said, since they are following LTSs, as you say, there should be a new version of gNewSense released some time soon, and when it is, I will be sure to give it a try.
9 August 2010, 8:26 pmArielEnter:
Wow, I surprise you were able to answer back. Thanks. I agree, the only solution that I know now days to be totally \free\ is buying a yeeloong. It depends on everyone’s personal ideas and believes.
24 August 2010, 9:00 pm