Wireless networking, however, is a bit of a throwback to the old days. Half the hardware doesn’t have Linux drivers, and half of the devices that do require you to hunt for the driver — based on the chipset, of course, not on the name or model number on the box — and compile it yourself. (At least these days, you can sometimes run a tool to adapt the Windows drivers if there’s no native Linux option.)

The steps I actually needed to take to set up wifi on my Fedora 13 desktop probably only amounted to about 10 minutes. Unfortunately it took a lot of false starts to get there. I had installed a Zonet ZEW1642 PCI card, which my initial research suggested would be supported by the built-in rt2860 drivers. As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple.

First, what didn’t work:

• Built-in drivers.
• The rt2860 drivers (or any others) from RPMFusion.
• Manually configuring the card with system-config-network (even after I got the right driver installed).

What did work:

• Download the driver and firmware from Ralink’s Linux website.
• Build and install the driver.
• Start using NetworkManager.

Key Info

1. lspci reports the card as:Network controller: RaLink Device 3062
2. It doesn’t use the rt2860 driver.
3. When the driver works, the card will show up as ra0 when you run ifconfig or iwconfig. If you run either of those and don’t see ra0, or if you try to configure ra0 and get a message like “unknown device,” you don’t have the right driver loaded.
4. When the driver works, NetworkManager will automatically recognize it. You don’t need to configure the interface first. (This tripped me up several times.)
5. The NetworkManager and network services conflict with each other. You have to pick one and disable the other.

Most of the information I found on this card…wasn’t actually about this card, but about related ones. What little I did find implied that it uses the same driver as the rt2860. It doesn’t. Well, not exactly. They use the same firmware, and the config file for the rt3062 is called RT2860STA.dat, which confuses the issue.

Howto

1. Go to Ralink’s Linux page and download the appropriate driver and firmware based on the model number.
2. Unzip the firmware
3. As root, copy rt280.bin to /lib/firmware/rt2860.bin
4. Unzip the driver source file (ex: tar xvf /download/linux/drivers/2010_07_16_RT3062_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.0.tar)
5. Step into the folder and read the instructions in README_STA
   1. You probably won’t need to change the Makefile or set compiler flags, but you will need to set it to work with either NetworkManager or wpa_supplicant. So edit os/linux/config.mk and set HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y and HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y (for NetworkManager). If you don’t change this, it will not work. (Don’t worry about the next coulple of lines about wpa_supplicant. They don’t seem to be necessary from what I can tell.)
   2. Build it by typing make in the main folder of the source archive.
   3. As root, copy RT2860STA.dat to /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
6. At this point, you can diverge from the directions a bit.
7. To install, switch to root and run make install in the main folder of the archive. This should copy rt3562sta.o to the appropriate location for your system.
8. If you haven’t been using NetworkManager, again as root, run service network stop to disable the standard network service (since it conflicts with NetworkManager).
9. Enable the driver: again as root, run modprobe rt3562sta
10. If you have NetworkManager running, it should immediately recognize the card and detect nearby networks.
11. Once you’ve got everything working, as root, run chkconfig --del network to permanently disable the other daemon. (But make a note of this in case you ever switch back.)

One more thing: keep this folder around! Because of the way Linux drivers work, you’ll need to re-install the drivers the next time your system updates to a new kernel. This is a pain, and is the reason I was hoping the built-in drivers or RPMFusion packages would work. More on that in the next section.

Follow-Through

Rebooting: Because I had previously removed NetworkManager from my system, I had to make sure the Gnome desktop would load the NM applet. That was fixed by going to System→Preferences→Startup Applications and enabling Network Manager.

Kernel Updates: I haven’t had to do this yet, but based on experience with other Red Hat-based systems where I’ve had to use third-party drivers, here’s how to reinstall the driver the next time Fedora sends you a kernel update.

After the new kernel is installed, but before you reboot, go back to the driver folder and run the following:

1. make clean
2. make
3. sudo make install (or just switch to root and run make install)
4. sudo modprobe rt3562sta (or stay as root and just run modprobe)

That should take care of it. If you forgot to do this first (and are reading this article on another computer), just run modprobe rt3562sta (as root) after you’re done.

Update: I originally suggested rebuilding the module before rebooting, but the Makefile automatically detects the running kernel. You can manually force it to use the source from the newer kernel, but for the sake of these directions, this way is simpler.

This 18-page thread at Fedora Forum was very informative, though it did point me in a few wrong directions.

Now I know: It’s the lack of space.

Last night I updated Gesture Search, which pushed the phone into low-space territory. I figured I’d deal with it later. This morning, I noticed that it wasn’t reporting new messages on Gmail. Reluctant to uninstall any more apps, I followed Katie’s suggestion of clearing out old text messages…and freed up 1.5 MB. (I figure it’s the pictures. They’d better be worth 1,000 words, because they take up a lot more disk space.) A few seconds later, the @ popped into the notification bar.

You’d think that 7+ MB would be plenty of room to download email and text messages, or tell the notification system to pop up a new icon. As near as I can tell, though, if the “Low on Space” icon is visible, Android won’t sync anything.

Next time, I’ll make a point of cleaning things up quickly.

With luck, this won’t be a problem with my next phone. (Yeah, I’m still on the G1.) Whether I go for a Samsung Vibrant, a G2, or something else, it should have more storage on the phone and the ability to install apps to the SD card.

Unfortunately, the detection doesn’t work on LinkedIn, leaving your blog with a broken image, empty square or text label, depending on the visitor’s web browser. The plugin developer is aware of the issue, but several months have gone by with no fix.

So I’ve fixed it. Here’s how you can fix it on your blog.

Technical Details

First, some background. The problem is that Social Homes is expecting to see this pattern:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path-to-icon">

But LinkedIn is using this equally valid pattern:

<link href="/path-to-icon" rel="shortcut icon">

This would be okay if it simply failed to find the icon, because it would fall back to /favicon.ico … which happens to be correct for LinkedIn. Instead it’s skipping past the end of the tag and picking up the next reference, which is currently a stylesheet.

The Fix

The simplest fix** is to just make sure it stops at the end of the tag, and let it fall back to favicon.ico.

Here’s what to do. Open up social-homes.php and look for the section titled, “Social Homes service parser.” The function you want is called widget_socialhomes_parse_service

Look for the section labeled, “grab the favicon” and find these two lines:

$tmpIcon1 = split('"shortcut icon"', $contents);
$tmpIcon2 = split('href="', $tmpIcon1[0]);

Add the middle line below, and change tmpIcon1[1] to tmpIcon1a[1] in what’s now the third line:

$tmpIcon1 = split('"shortcut icon"', $contents);
$tmpIcon1a = split('>', $tmpIcon1[1]);
$tmpIcon2 = split('href="', $tmpIcon1a[0]);

That’s it! All you have to do now is go back into your Widgets config, open up the Social Homes widget, and re-save it!

*Technically, you can link to any website, whether it’s a social networking profile or not, but that’s the original intent.

**A more proper fix would be to change the way Social Homes looks for the icon so that it doesn’t depend on the link attributes being in the same order, but this is a simpler change.

The error message it kept popping up was:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items.

So it didn’t have permission to access or save the items, but it had permission to delete them? Clearly the error message wasn’t telling the whole story!

Even stranger: if I opened a file with an application like TextWrangler or NeoOffice, they had no problem saving it! It was only Finder that had the problem!

Now, I’ve successfully transferred files back and forth between these computers many times before, but I had changed two things recently:

• Upgraded the Linux box to Fedora 13.
• Installed the Mac OS X 10.6.4 update to Snow Leopard.

I didn’t have much luck searching online, maybe because I was looking for the wrong terms. The closest I came up with were discussions like this one, but they all involved a server using netatalk or other AFP file sharing implementations. I’ve been using samba (Windows-Style SMB shares) on the Linux box ever since I had some problems with Netatalk and decided that since the Mac would connect via Samba, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I idly posted the problem on Twitter. My brother replied that he’d run into the same problem (on Ubuntu, IIRC), and suggested turning off Unix extensions in Samba. That meant opening up /etc/samba/smb.conf on the Linux box and adding the following line to the “Filesystem Options” section:

unix extensions = no

I restarted Samba on the Linux box, and that was it. The Mac was able to copy files over without any errors!

I hope this post helps someone else solve the same problem.

Yesterday, some more email-to-SMS texts vanished into the ether. I figured something must be up with the gateway, so I changed the alerts so that they would also send to my Gmail account, figuring that if the text messages failed, I’d still get a notice.

They didn’t show up either.

That’s when I realized that nothing on the phone was actually syncing: Not Gmail, not the contacts, not the calendar…and it just wasn’t receiving text messages at all.

I tried turning sync off and back on, manually syncing, restarting the phone (both a hard reset cycling the power and a soft reset, sort of the Ctrl-Alt-Delete equivalent using the green, red and menu buttons together), even clearing all the local data for Gmail, Gmail storage, and Calendar storage.

Well, none of that worked. It marked all the apps for syncing, but wouldn’t actually start.

So it was time to backtrack: What had I changed recently?

Well, I’d updated several apps. Off the top of my head I could think of Twidroid Pro and the Weather Channel, but I couldn’t remember what else.

I’d also installed a new app, Layar, an augmented reality app which I’d seen in an ad for some other phone last week, but hadn’t actually gotten around to trying out. Adding it triggered a low space warning, but the phone still had 6.8 MB free, which ought to have been plenty.

Curiously enough, the last successful sync was right around the time that I installed Layar. Hmm…

Okay, what the heck. I uninstalled it. Within seconds, the phone bleeped and picked up the test messages I’d sent to Gmail. Within a minute, several text messages arrived, including my test from this morning and two alerts from last night.

Well, that was certainly suspicious.

So I installed it again, and this time actually opened the app to try it out (making it display the location of pizza places as seen from my desk), and sent myself a test message at Gmail. I can’t say I was surprised when the test message showed up on my desktop, but not on my phone, even when I manually refreshed my inbox in Gmail. Within a minute of uninstalling the app again, the message showed up.

So, no Layar for me. I don’t know if it doesn’t work with the G1, with Android 1.6, or with something else I have on the phone…or if it’s not Layar at all, and the phone just needs more space to sync.

The message is clear, though: If your phone stops syncing, or stops receiving text messages, look at what’s changed. There’s a good chance that the problem is related.

Update: It’s been about half an hour, and the voice mail notice just popped up…for a couple of messages I received on Sunday! It looks like the problem was blocking everything that used the standard sync/notify system on the phone. Twidroid was working, so I guess it must use its own system.

Update 2: I’ve confirmed that it’s just the low space, not the particular app, that causes the problem.

I don’t use Windows Live Messenger. I don’t even have an account on Windows Live Messenger. But every time I logged in to my system, WLM would pop up a window and ask me to log in. Every single time.

There was no obvious way to disable it, and most of the suggestions I found online only applied to earlier versions of Windows.

It doesn’t provide an option to stop it from launching on startup. Or rather, it does, but only if you’ve logged into WLM. Since I didn’t have an account, I couldn’t do that, and I wasn’t about to create one just to turn it off!

It wasn’t in the Start-Up folder.

I didn’t see it in Services, so I couldn’t disable it there.

I tried running System Configuration and disabling it in the Startup tab, but that didn’t work.

I couldn’t even find it in the list of programs to uninstall.

But you know what?

I finally got rid of it! And it was easier than I expected.

It turns out that if you uninstall Windows Live Essentials, you don’t have to remove the whole thing. You can choose which pieces to remove! Just tell it to uninstall, and it’ll bring up a checklist of the pieces that are on the system. Check off Windows Live Messenger, leave the pieces you want to keep, and hit Continue.

Done!

This stupid “OMG Nepomuk is not running!” error has been dogging me every time I launch KMail, ever since Fedora upgraded KDE. I followed all the directions on fixing Akonadi, and nothing worked. Finally, it turned out that there was a config file telling it to load the old-style “redland” database — which doesn’t exist in current versions of Nepomuk — instead of the new “virtuoso” database.

The file was in ~.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc and the item in question is “Used Soprano Backend.” I changed it from “redland” to “virtuosobackend” as described here and now it actually starts Nepomuk, and KMail doesn’t complain when I start it!

Someone at KDE decided to massively overcomplicate things!

*grumble*

It turns out that Buzz uses HTML5 features (specifically appcache, database and location) to store local data and to detect your physical location…and those capabilities were added in Android 2.0.

The support thread mentions that they are “working on another version that will make Buzz for mobile accessible on older Android OS versions (and some other smartphones as well).” The browser in Android 1.6 and below supports similar capabilities through Gears, so they may be planning a Gears-based workaround.

This would be a lot less of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that most of the Android phones out there still run 1.6 or even Android 1.5. IIRC only the Droid and Nexus One have officially been updated to 2.0 so far**, so unless you have one of those two models, you’re more likely to get Buzz to run on an iPhone than Android.

Funny, that.

*I’ve got a G1. It can only access Buzz through the updated Maps app, which brought up a bunch of people in nearby office parks posting things like “Testing Buzz” and “WTF is Google Buzz?”

**A few other phones have had updates announced, but I don’t think any have actually shipped yet. I could be wrong.

Whenever the low-on-space warning* icon shows up on the phone, I open up the list of applications. Then I sort it by size, look for the largest apps that I don’t use anymore, and start uninstalling.

“Browser” is always high on the list, but it’s all data. While I could free up the space by telling it to clear everything, I want to hang onto things like bookmarks. Each time the icon popped up, I’d go back to the app, open up More and then Settings, and clear the cache, or the history, or cookies**, one category at a time.

Then I’d go back to the App list and it would still be using up several megabytes of space.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to check the Gears settings. Months ago, I’d set up two WordPress blogs with Turbo mode, which uses Gears as a permanent cache for the admin area. It’s great on a desktop or laptop with lots of local space and a slow or flaky Internet connection. But it wasn’t helping me much, because…

• WordPress Turbo Mode is only really useful if you use the rich-text editor, which I don’t.
• On the phone, I rarely manage either blog through the browser anyway. I usually use WordPress for Android (formerly wpToGo).
• The files it stores take up a whole megabyte — per blog! (possibly more, depending on how the file system stores them.)

So I removed both sites from Gears, along with a couple of other sites that I’d added, but didn’t need anymore, and freed up about 3 MB.

It should be a while before I see that low-space icon again, and I shouldn’t have to ration my installed apps quite so closely!

*This wouldn’t be a problem if they’d given the G1 enough memory for apps in the first place, or if they’d let us install apps to the SD card (where I still have gigabytes of free space), or if I were willing to root my phone, or if I’d just bite the bullet and buy a Nexus One.

**I’d really like to be able to selectively delete cookies — or rather, to selectively keep a few cookies and delete the rest — but that’s another issue.