Yes, you can use that Sprint EVDO Rev A Pantech PX-500 card on Ubuntu!  Network credentials are stored on the card so all we need to do is make sure we have a couple of kernel modules loaded and write two simple scripts to get it all working.  The PX-card has an OHCI compatible USB bridge internally off of which hangs the CDC serial port so it’s pretty easy.

First make sure you’re running a recent kernel by running uname -r and a terminal prompt.

Then, insert the card and let’s make sure you have the necessary kernel modules loaded:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo lsmod | grep cdc

cdc_acm                    15904 0

usbcore                     134280 7 cdc_acm,ohci_hcd,xpad,usbhid,uhci_hcd,echi_hcd

If your output matches the above, you already have the cdc_acm and ohci_hcd kernel modules loaded automatically. 

1) Install the Sprint Connection software on Windows XP or Vista

2) Insert the card, choose yes to update the firmware and activate the card by calling Sprint and providing the necessary information.

3) Reboot into Linux and insert the card into a free PCMCIA slot.  This tutorial will be done on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn with kernel 2.6.20-16-generic.  If you use the the 2.6.20 kernel, you won’t have to compile in any additonal modules.

4) We’ve already confirmed that we have the correct kernel modules above so now you’ll need to create two extra files using these steps:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo vi /etc/ppp/peers/Sprint_EVDO

noauth
# Connection Script
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/sprint-evdo” 
defaultroute
replacedefaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0
230400
local
novj

michael@feisty:~$ sudo mkdir /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@feisty:~$ cd /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@fesity:~$ sudo vi sprint-evdo

TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           ’\nBUSY\r’
ABORT           ’\nERROR\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO ANSWER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO CARRIER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO DIALTONE\r’
ABORT           ’\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r’
”              \rAT
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATE0V1&F&D2&C1S0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATS0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATDT#777
TIMEOUT         20 
CONNECT         ”"

5) run this command to start the connection:

michael@feisty:~$ /usr/sbin/pppd call Sprint_EVDO updetach

And you’re good to go.  Interestingly, I saw about 25% faster speeds consistently under Linux and XP compared to Vista.  I know the card hasn’t been officially certified under Vista, but it’s not certified on Linux either and 25% is a huge difference.  Test your speed over at Speedtest.net

P.S. You might get different results with another distribution (especially Suse) and kernel but if you are still having problems, drop me a line at mikebuckingham at gmail dot com and I’ll try and help.

At 2 PM PST, Dell will start selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.  I never actually thought I’d see this day to be honest.  Sure, Linux is more than ready for the desktop, but not quite ready for me to install it for Mom.  Still, this is huge and must have caused some serious riffs with the folks in Redmond.  Though I’ve used Linux on servers since late 1998, I’ve only been using it on my desktop for the past couple of years and never once thought of putting it on a laptop because if the lack of quality open source drivers for wireless cards.  That all changed with the release of Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn.  Prior to relocating to Colorado Springs, I purchased a laptop with Windows Vista Premium on it for the road trip and found that the laptop was not ready for Vista.  The drivers for the screen, keyboard and wireless card never worked properly and it was only out of a troubleshooting session that I decided to install Linux to see if the blank screen was the fault of the OS. 

Not only did Ubuntu install beautifully, but it recognized my wireless card and I only had to put in my WPA key to make it work.  Hibernation also works incredibly well whereas if I did that in Vista, I’d have to start in safe mode and reboot.   I’m incredibly excited about Dell’s move and it kills me to not buy one today to support the cause and reward a company for finally getting it.  But I don’t think the boss (Amy) really cares about the FOSS movement so it will have to wait for a few days.  Ok, weeks.  You’re right honey, years.

Yesterday Wordpress released a significant update to the world’s most popular CMS. Mainly security fixes but also:

1) HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
2) Comments are filtered to prevent long winded ones from hosing up your well crafted blog layout.
3) Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI environments

And while I’m on this subject, you should checkout Nixcraft’s guide to upgrading Wordpress in three simple steps via the command line. I used it to upgrade the three Wordpress installations I manage on this server and was able to do all three in under 6 minutes (the longest thing was tarring up the directories).

After recently ending my three year love affair with Gentoo, I moved to Ubuntu when I found Mint, an Ubuntu based distribution that comes preloaded with all the codecs necesary to enjoy multimedia as well as some other tweaks. Debian’s dpkg/apt package manager is by far the best in the biz (yes, even better than portage), but I had stayed away from Ubuntu because 1) it’s so popular 2) I hate that damn brown theme and 3) it took me a half day of “apt-get install” -ing just to play a damn mp3 file. I understand why but please don’t drag me down into your ideology war RMS.

With Mint, it’s just install and play! That being said, you’ll still need to install some stuff like smbfs (to mount your NAS smb shares), nmap, sshfs, etc, but once you’ve got it absolutely perfect, you can clone it easily.

While doing some research for this post, I found some crazy ass 50 line awk scrtipts and choked on my Mountain Dew more than once. I’ve got a better method and no, this doesn’t involve the use of dd (which I’m thinking of writing a lengthly post on since I have some time). The idea here is just to export all of the packages I currently have into a text file and then use dpkg to install those on any other debian based machine.

Run this to ask dpkg to export all of your installed packages into a text list:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt


On the new machine, copy installed packages.txt to / and use dpkg to import and have apt-get install these packages (after you’ve run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade of course):

sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed_packages.txt


Then do apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you're done!

(Source: Knoppix Wiki)

Firefox 2 was released today (not yesterday as reported by most of the tech news sites). Get it for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (I’m having a problem compiling it on my Gentoo Linux box though).

Notable Improvements that I think you’ll notice:
1) Page rendering speed (I actually noticed)

2) Visual Refresh: Firefox 2’s theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.

3) Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.

4) Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash. This is already a feature of Opera but is incredibly annoying at work as it tries ot authenticate 15 pages at once upon startup.

5) Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a separate application.