Category: Linux

Using Huawei E220 HSDPA modem in GNU/Linux

If you’ve been following me on twitter you already know that I got a mobile broadband connection. But if you don’t know it yet, thats a good reason you should follow me on twitter. Anyways! the modem I got with my connection is the Huawei E220, And I’m very happy to say that it works perfectly fine under GNU/Linux. I was actually planning to write a blog post on that but was busy by some projects done with our local kde developer siraj 🙂 (nothing related to KDE by the way)

Few days back I stumbled upon a blog which the blog owner has written a post on switching to GNU/Linux. One of his consernce was getting his Huawei e220 working on Linux. Well, of course its a piece of cake, but I could risk a new linux user steping away from linux because he had a small prob with his 3g modem 😛 so wrote this comment on his blog to realize that I almost wrote a complete blog post on how to get it done. And decided that I should publish it on my blog so anyone else having problems with 3G connectivity on linux can solve them. so here goes my mini tutorial. Btw, I did some adjestments to it so it fits in.

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E220 works perfectly with wvdial on ubuntu Hardy Haron.
Here are the steps…
(1) Plug in the modem and run
sudo wvdialconf
(2) Then edit the wvdial.conf file…
sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf Uncomment Username and Password lines in wvdial.conf and add the following to the end of the file “stupid mode = yes“
(3) Save the wvdial.conf
(4) run wvdial to get connected 🙂

If you are using ubuntu 8.10 then the Graphical Network Manager recognizes the modem and connects you within seconds.

I usually use kppp with my Slackware installation and it runs really well too. I prefer kppp over wvdial because it even logs the data usage of the modem.

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Thats all folks! if anyone needs help, I’m just a blog comment away, or just send me an @message on twitter and yes I’m the seejay on twitter.

~seejay~

Get Atheros 5007eg working under GNU/Linux

The Wifi card in my new ASUS lappy was Atheros 5007eg and unlike intel’s wifi cards, Atheros doesn’t seems to be working “out of the box” in any Linux distributions 😦 But you can use MadWifi tools to get them working right??? well, thats what i thought until i tried madWifi, I’ve seen many success stories on the web which madWifi worked for Atheros 5006 cards but apparently 5007eg is relatively new and doesn’t seems to be working with madWifi “yet”
After typing sudo iwconfig in the Terminal here’s what i got…

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

So i decided to do it the other way. By using the windows driver with “ndiswrapper” and after few hours of hard work 😉 i was able to get wifi up and running :D. And the first thing came to my mind was “I gotta blog about this so that no one else will have to waste their time finding ways to get Atheros 5007 working with linux” 🙂

So, here i’ll describe how to get Atheros 5007eg working with Ubuntu. I’m also planning to write a post on how to get it working with Slackware as soon as i get some time to try. 😀 ok here’s what i did.

First go to system>>administration>>Restricted Drivers Manager, Disable HAL and then reboot.

Then you’ll have to install ndiswrapper from Synaptic. Here are the three packages you are gonna install.
ndisgtk
ndiswrapper-common
ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

After installing ndiswrapper you’ll need the windows driver of your wifi card in my case. I had the Atheros 5007eg driver in a DVD which came with my lappy and if you don’t have, you can get appropriate driver from the Atheros website. its http://www.atheros.cz/

Open the Terminal. Go to the folder where you got the windows driver(the .inf file) for your Atheros card and type
ndiswrapper -i xxx.inf (replace xxx with the name of the inf file)

Now we have to blacklist ath_pci for type gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist in the terminal

Add the following line to the end of the file.

blacklist ath_pci

Then type ndiswrapper -l to list the installed drivers if your driver is working you should see something like the following

net5211 : driver installed
device (168C:001C) present (alternate driver: ath_pci)

Type these commands in the terminal one after other

sudo depmod -a

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

sudo ndiswrapper -m

And type gksudo gedit /etc/modules
and add ndiswrapper to the end of the file and save it.

That’s all folks! 😀 now reboot the machine and you can check whether the wifi is working (of course it is!) by typing sudo iwconfig in the Terminal here’s what i get after the process.

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Ok! Have fun! and feel free to let me know if you have any problems or any unclear steps in this post
~seejay~

2.6.21.4 fixes three vulnerabilities

Linux kernel 2.6.21.4, fixes three vulnerabilities. A null pointer dereference in netfilter can cause the kernel to crash when processing certain connections. This bug can be triggered remotely. In addition, as a result of a bug in the
cpuset_tasks_read function, users logged onto the system can read part of the kernel memory. This may allow an attacker to access protected information. Finally the kernel also harbors a bug which affects the way seeds for generating random numbers are generated where the system has no entropy source. This may result in applications which rely on random number generators being less secure. -SeeJay

Firefox Inside Firefox

Hellow Fellows!
You know that many of us spend lot of our computing time on the internet and most of that time we use Firefox tabs to open all our favorite sites and services inside Firefox right?, yes, Gmail inside Ff, Yahoo inside Ff, ebay inside Ff, Banking inside Ff ect. ect. ect… With all these favorites inside Firefox, How about opening Firefox inside Firefox? Not bad ha? and its really easy too! just type in this url in a new tab in Firefox and there you go! Firefox inside Firefox!

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

Disclaimer: I guarantee that this will work with Firefox. But I have no responsibility of any damage that cause Internet Explorer users by Using this with IE to Open Firefox inside IE 😆
C.J.

update: feel free to visit my new blog http://seejay.net for more Firefox tricks!