Five Minutes

My suspicion last night that ndiswrapper would cure my wireless ills appears to have been correct. It’s a bit of a step back, really, since it means (a) that I’m reliant on the Windows drivers and (b) that I had to switch to a 32-bit Ubuntu install since Apple don’t provide 64-bit drivers for the AR5418 wireless chipset on the Leopard DVD, but I’m not getting dropouts and stalls every couple of minutes now, so I guess I’ll have to grin and bear it.

Happily, everything else has worked out of the box in Ubuntu Gutsy. In fact, it’s probably all worked a bit too well — I had an afternoon of tinkering with things planned, but everything got configured much quicker than expected, which now means that I have no real excuse to avoid studying for tomorrow morning’s exam. Damn you, efficient FLOSS developers!

Oh yes, the in-built webcam works, too. That promises to be… minutes of fun. Oh well, it’s still better than studying.

General catch-up post, since I haven’t blogged in a while:

• Not dead. Just been busy.
• Now done with uni, bar one exam and my computer science project, which is complete apart from a couple of bugfixes and some documentation which are due in Monday week. I’m looking forward to having some actual time to do things outside of uni. Who knows, I might even get Dubnium 0.2 out at some point.
• Went and saw Muse tonight, who were good, but not quite great in the way they have been the other times I’ve seen them. In fairness, I think some of that was due to the crowd, who (at least in my area) weren’t quite into it the way I expected. Against that, they played Citizen Erased and Fury (the latter for the first time in almost three years, apparently), so I’d forgive them almost anything for that. Looking forward to seeing them in Brisbane in a couple of weeks.
• Got my new MacBook Pro yesterday. It’s very speedy compared to the venerable G4 iBook it’s replacing (indeed, I’m pretty much certain it’s quicker than my dual core Athlon 64 desktop, too), but there’s a couple of things that irk me, most notably the fact that the Linux Atheros wireless chipset driver may actually be flakier than the Broadcom chipset in the iBook, and I never expected to say that. I suspect I’ll need to sit down with ndiswrapper at some point and look at getting that set up. On the bright side, suspend actually seems to be working, bar Atheros-related flakiness.

Hopefully it won’t be another three weeks before my next blog post. No promises, though.