2004-12-4
The Man
Who Is Da Man? I am.
Oh yes. Why would I make such a claim?
Well, let me tell you.
I am currently posting from emacs, the gui version under X Windows, on my iBook. Wirelessly. So I unstalled Emacs for OS X? Nope. I have Yellowdog 4 running on my iBook, with wireless. Because I am The Man.
Let me back up. Ever since I bought my D-link wireless USB dongle I have been trying to use Linux with wireless, months ago. Before I bought the wireless, I was using a combination of OS X and OpenBSD with dialup. Then I played with Debian. Once I started working on the wireless, I discovered that the device was only supported under OS X and Linux. Someone had it working under YellowDog, Debian, and maybe Gentoo. I could not get an install together on most distros, and even if I got installed, I could not get wireless working. At one point I had compiled two kernels under Fedora 3 and the module for my device would not load. Ugh.
I gave up several times. OS X is a nice system. But it just doesn't run the Unix software that I want. Debian's apt-get is the best thing going, there is so much software available. But I got used to using yum at work when I was running Fedora, and so far Yellowdog seems to have everything I need. Fink can be very frustrating. And I still kid myself into thinking I want to try some X and GTK development. I know some people are running GNOME and OS X's X server, but...
I won't go into what was required to set things up too much, but briefly:
Installed Yellowdog 4.
The main yum repository (base in yum.conf) was slow/timing out, so I switched to another. This is not required.
set up sudo
sudo yum install kernel-source
make symlink ln -s /usr/src/linuxwhatever /usr/src/linux
copy /usr/src/linux/config/therightconfig /usr/src/linux/config
cd /usr/src/linux; make oldconfig
Now download linux-wlan-ng source, untar, and make config
Damn thing seems to be working.
Then create this file in /etc/systemconfig/network-scripts/wlan0:
BROADCAST=""
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
DEVICE=wlan0
NETWORK=""
IPADDR=""
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
PEERDNS=yes
Then make a script in your home folder called wirelessstart or something:
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.10 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/route -v add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev wlan0
/sbin/route -v add default gw 192.168.0.1
You have to chmod +x wirelessstart. I wrote this. Basically when you unplug your dongle, the routing and ifconfig stuff gets blowed away. So you have to sudo ./wirelessstart and surf away!
Obviously substitute your particular ip, netmask, network, and gateway.
I am sure that it is possible to configure wlan0 using dhclient like any other if, but I am not there yet. It didn't automagically work last night. Maybe the routing is the problem?
Okay, I have been cursing Yellowdog for months because:
-There is no OFW/bootstrap partition install option, or even instructions, had to hack it myself using OFW and yaboot.conf
-3.0 could not install on machines with hfs+ journaled fs. So when 4RC1 was out, that fix was already done, but non-paying customers could not have it. That is not sharing, is it a GPL violation? I don't know that the source code was available freely, although they were selling downloads through their webhosting business.
Finally, I ironically got Linux+wifi going on my laptop using their software. I'm conflicted! Damn it runs good. And it is basically Fedora built on PPC, so it is very familiar to anyone who has used RedHat 8 or 9 or ES 3 or White Box Server. Yum works fine, especially after switching to a fast http mirror.
Okay, got distracted just now, Evolution is set up, and Mozilla. I'm using the Workstation install, which is a KDE desktop. I set it up to look like KDE2 with a red accent instead of blue, and the SGI widget look. Unixy but modern. I guess I've been using KDE so long that it just makes sense to me now, more than other graphical environments.
Okay, battery is running down. Got through last week of classes, exams Monday and Wednesday. Pray for Mojo.
Oh yes. Why would I make such a claim?
Well, let me tell you.
I am currently posting from emacs, the gui version under X Windows, on my iBook. Wirelessly. So I unstalled Emacs for OS X? Nope. I have Yellowdog 4 running on my iBook, with wireless. Because I am The Man.
Let me back up. Ever since I bought my D-link wireless USB dongle I have been trying to use Linux with wireless, months ago. Before I bought the wireless, I was using a combination of OS X and OpenBSD with dialup. Then I played with Debian. Once I started working on the wireless, I discovered that the device was only supported under OS X and Linux. Someone had it working under YellowDog, Debian, and maybe Gentoo. I could not get an install together on most distros, and even if I got installed, I could not get wireless working. At one point I had compiled two kernels under Fedora 3 and the module for my device would not load. Ugh.
I gave up several times. OS X is a nice system. But it just doesn't run the Unix software that I want. Debian's apt-get is the best thing going, there is so much software available. But I got used to using yum at work when I was running Fedora, and so far Yellowdog seems to have everything I need. Fink can be very frustrating. And I still kid myself into thinking I want to try some X and GTK development. I know some people are running GNOME and OS X's X server, but...
I won't go into what was required to set things up too much, but briefly:
Installed Yellowdog 4.
The main yum repository (base in yum.conf) was slow/timing out, so I switched to another. This is not required.
set up sudo
sudo yum install kernel-source
make symlink ln -s /usr/src/linuxwhatever /usr/src/linux
copy /usr/src/linux/config/therightconfig /usr/src/linux/config
cd /usr/src/linux; make oldconfig
Now download linux-wlan-ng source, untar, and make config
Damn thing seems to be working.
Then create this file in /etc/systemconfig/network-scripts/wlan0:
BROADCAST=""
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
DEVICE=wlan0
NETWORK=""
IPADDR=""
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
PEERDNS=yes
Then make a script in your home folder called wirelessstart or something:
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.10 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/route -v add -net 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev wlan0
/sbin/route -v add default gw 192.168.0.1
You have to chmod +x wirelessstart. I wrote this. Basically when you unplug your dongle, the routing and ifconfig stuff gets blowed away. So you have to sudo ./wirelessstart and surf away!
Obviously substitute your particular ip, netmask, network, and gateway.
I am sure that it is possible to configure wlan0 using dhclient like any other if, but I am not there yet. It didn't automagically work last night. Maybe the routing is the problem?
Okay, I have been cursing Yellowdog for months because:
-There is no OFW/bootstrap partition install option, or even instructions, had to hack it myself using OFW and yaboot.conf
-3.0 could not install on machines with hfs+ journaled fs. So when 4RC1 was out, that fix was already done, but non-paying customers could not have it. That is not sharing, is it a GPL violation? I don't know that the source code was available freely, although they were selling downloads through their webhosting business.
Finally, I ironically got Linux+wifi going on my laptop using their software. I'm conflicted! Damn it runs good. And it is basically Fedora built on PPC, so it is very familiar to anyone who has used RedHat 8 or 9 or ES 3 or White Box Server. Yum works fine, especially after switching to a fast http mirror.
Okay, got distracted just now, Evolution is set up, and Mozilla. I'm using the Workstation install, which is a KDE desktop. I set it up to look like KDE2 with a red accent instead of blue, and the SGI widget look. Unixy but modern. I guess I've been using KDE so long that it just makes sense to me now, more than other graphical environments.
Okay, battery is running down. Got through last week of classes, exams Monday and Wednesday. Pray for Mojo.
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