WRT54GL & ADSL2MUE

I got a fon router last year, one of the early ones a WRT54GL. I found it frustrating having to go through the FON login screen, and guests needing a FON login to use it, and in reality I never used another FON hotspot in the whole year I had it, which involved a fair bit of travelling.  I flashed it ( although I did step 6 differently just uploading a standard firmware into the web dialog )  as it has come to the end of its 1yr term.

The modem I bought to go with it a Linksys ADSL2MUE I bought for price. Its an unreliable piece of hardware, I found some upgraded firmware for it not officially released by linksys, which allows you to do port forwarding on it and seems to work more reliably with the WRT54GL.

(X)Ubuntu

Tried installing Xubuntu on an aging 9 year old computer tonight. Its a Celeron 400Mhz with 192MB of ram and I chucked a new 160GB hard disk in.

The installer ran kind of slow on it and unfortunately the partitioning part of the Xubuntu installer has a crucial bug init which causs it to crash at 15% of Installation while ‘detecting file systems’.

I had an Ubuntu Fesity CD so I ran the installer on that and it eventually installed, took the best part of an hour. Everything worked apart from the network card which is an old ISA D-Link DE 220p so I had no connectivity initially on the machine but managed to search for help on the problem and it works fine now.

Have updated Dapper on my Vaio to Feisty now, had to go through Edgy using Update Manager, don’t notice a lot of change, apart from some icon changes and better wireless connections.

Having been using Dell Precision, with its high resolution 17″ screen going back to 1024*768 feels cramped, enabled autohide on the top bar in Ubuntu and would like to do the same with the bottom.

Also downloaded qSynaptics which solved the tapping/clicking problem I had with the trackpad, you have to edit xconf.org and then run qSynaptics.

Noticed the Nokia 770 is for sale at Expansys for £75, kind of tempting would like an internet tablet but might wait till the N800 comes down in price.

Think I will get a Neuros OSD currently on sale from Expansys for £140.25

Really like the philosophy of the company, and it will be useful for ripping some stuff from the PVR I have stored and some stuff currently degrading on VHS and will be interesting to see how YouTube and other video downloaded off the net look on the TV.

Bought a Buffalo 500GB USB external hard disk ( £86 ), for freeing up some space on the VAIO and backing up photos across multiple laptops. Hopefully it should hook up to the Neuros ok. Thinking about getting a Linksys NSLU2 ( £58 ) for accessing the drive from the laptops.