My new ASUS X51R laptop and Ubuntu 8.04

Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 21st June 2008 15:31:19 (GMT +0530)

After giving up my IBM Thinkpad laptop sometime back, I got used to working on Desktops for a while. But it didn't help me a great deal in organizing things when shifting my work from home to office and vice versa. So again I started hunting for a laptop that will fulfill all my needs. Finally I settled with an ASUS X51R notebook that comes with a Dual Core 2Ghz processor, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI VGA Card, 120GB Hard disk, DVD Writer, Wireless etc.. It turned out to be good deal at the end so I went for it.



I loaded my OS of choice Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on this and everything went very smoothly except that I couldn't get the wireless working. By running lspci the wireless card was shown as Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter which is an Atheros AR5007EG wireless card. The proprietary driver for Atheros was installed by Hardy but when I ran iwconfig this is what I got.


Few google searches resulted me about madwifi. Madwifi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets. I got madwifi installed and got my wireless card working. Here is how I did it.

First I disabled both proprietary drivers in System -> Administration -> Hardware drivers.

Then in the command prompt I did the following

Get this version of madwifi

Untar the file

Move inside the directory

You might need build-essential if you haven't compiled anything before

Building madwifi and installing the modules

Loading module at boot

Enter the line below in the last line of the file and save.
ath_pci

Thats it. I restarted the machine and ran iwconfig again to check


As you can see its now showing that the wireless card is working properly. Thanks to madwifi.

When it came to my graphic card I had to use the ATI propriety driver to make full use of it. Since Hardy comes with compiz out of the box I managed to get the 3D desktop working without much hassle.

To get compiz working in Hardy there are two things to be done.
1. Goto System -> Preferences - Appearance and click Visual Effects tab. Then tick Extra to get the effects working.
2. Install the Compiz Settings Manager.


After installing you can goto System -> Preferences - Advanced Desktop Effects Settings to add/configure/remove effects related to compiz.

I also enabled Emerald themes to get out of the standard Gnome look. Here is how got emerald working.


Now if you goto System -> Preferences - Emerald Theme Manager you can configure an Emerald theme of your choice. By default it doesn't come with any themes so you need to download themes from Gnome-Look.
However you need to tell compiz to use Emerald as its Window Decorator. To do that goto System -> Preferences - Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and under Effects category click on the Window Decoration icon which will take you to its settings. In the 'Command' field delete whatever is in there and add this value to that field


Have fun..

I found a nice Emerald theme which kinda reflects the one used by Matt Farrell in the movie Die Hard 4.0. Here are few screeshots of my desktop.

3D desktop with compiz on Hardy


Desktop with new look theme

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Firefox3 downloads hit 8 million mark

Posted by Nazly on Thursday, 19th June 2008 11:11:22 (GMT +0530)



What a day it was, helping Firefox to set a new Guinness World Record. The Download Day is an awesome success I guess reaching more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours. It was supposed to begin at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th. It was 10.30p.m. here in Sri Lanka at that time when I tried to login to getfirefox.com but the site was down and all Firefox related sites were hit hardly by the massive crowd login in at that time. I tried couple of times but no response. Then my Internet connection got dropped may be due to a failure from the ISPs end for some reason. I couldn't login yesterday morning even but checked the progress at SpreadFirefox's Download Day page. Finally around mid-day I was able to download Firefox3 as I pledged. What a feeling it was. The people of Guinness will review the World Record attempt, so it will take a few days to know whether this made it to the Records.

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KPs modified reverse sweep

Posted by Nazly on Wednesday, 18th June 2008 12:24:03 (GMT +0530)

England are on a roll after winning the Test Series against New Zealand. After that they have won the Twenty20 match as well the first One Day match as well. Keven Pietersen's solid batting performances have been a major factor to England's success. KP's century in the first ODI was a highlight of the series. The reason being his modified reverse sweep hit for six creating some controversy. This is not the first instance that he has reverse swept for six. He became famous after his reverse sweep for six against Muralitharan in a Test match. But his unique style of reverse sweeping is the key. He in fact switches the hands before the ball being delivered making him almost like a left handed batsman. This created some controversy but he has been cleared by the MCC, the guardian of the laws of cricket. Hope he will regain the No.1 spot of the ODI batsmen list soon.

KP's modified reverse sweep for six against Scott Styris




KP's famous reverse sweep for six against Muralitharan

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Make history with Firefox3

Posted by Nazly on Wednesday, 18th June 2008 11:06:22 (GMT +0530)

Are you ready to make history? Are you ready to set a World Record? Today is Download Day. To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.
-Email from SpreadFirefox

The Firefox3 Download Day has officially begun. For Sri Lankan's the cutoff time will be 10.30pm today. So go download Firefox3 by this time. Don't forget to spread the word as well.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

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Here comes Firefox 3

Posted by Nazly on Tuesday, 17th June 2008 00:00:56 (GMT +0530)



Upto now1,375,759 people have pledged to download Firefox 3 to set a Guinness World Record for the most no of downloads for a software when its released on 17th June 2008 which is today. 1,711 Sri Lankans are in that list so make sure you download Firefox 3 when its released.

The date/time for the Firefox 3 Lauch Party here in Sri Lanka will be announced soon. So be ready for that as well ;-)

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Comments (3)

do yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid?

Posted by Nazly on Wednesday, 11th June 2008 13:44:44 (GMT +0530)

When I open my mailbox 50% of them are forwarded emails. My junks are filtered with 99.9% accuracy so I don't worry about them. Most of forwarders I ignore and don't fall into the trap of being asked to forward it to more and more people. There are times I read them for the fun of it, some are useless where some I find it interesting. This email I got today has been circulating for a while now I mean for a good 2-3 years if I remember correctly but I felt that I have a strange mind too after reading it

Finally as usual it asks you to forward the email. But what did I do? I posted in on my blog instead. How stupid am I?

This is weird, but interesting!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it

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