computing.dwighthubbard.info

I figured I would do a quick post to explain how I managed to get my eeePc running kubuntu connecting to the internet with my Windows mobile phone running WMWifiRouter.

The main issue in getting this to work is that the madwifi-ng atheros driver needs special configuration to connect using the ad-hoc mode that WMWifiRouter uses. I found that the sequence of commands below made it work.

/etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager stop
ifconfig ath0 down
wlanconfig ath0 destroy
wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ad-hoc
iwconfig ath1 channel 1
iwconfig ath1 essid WMWifiRouter
ifconfig ath1 up
dhclient ath1

I picked myself up a new laptop on my Birthday. I new ASUS eeePc in black. It is turning out to be a pretty laptop. It’s only marginally larger than my old Newton PDA so it’s small enough to carry anyware, it was really inexpensive (I could buy 3 of the eeePc’s for what a single MacBook costs), and best of all it doesn’t run Microsoft Windows so there aren’t the added incremental costs and headaches that Microsoft windows requires.

So far I have managed to replace the base Xandros OS that it shipped with and replace it with Kubuntu.  It makes a decent MythTV frontend for SD TV content.  Although KDE4 doesn’t run very well on it due to the new KDE kicker replacement taking up a significant amount of the eeePC’s small screen.

It also work very well connecting to the internet through my Cingular 8525 phone that is running WMWifiRouter.

When creating a switch using “esxcfg-vswitch” it is possible to specify the number of ports for the new switch by adding placing a ‘:’ followed by the number of ports right after the vswitch name. So for example to create a vswitch named vSwitch7 with 256 ports the command would be:
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch7:256

I finally got a working script to crop out the annoying black borders and transcoding my mythtv recordings. This is a fairly primitive script but it is working for me. The current version is on the download page.  I have added this script as a user job, when I have some time I’ll post how to set it up.