Wireless Broadband on Fedora

I decided it was time to add broadband to my mobile setup. So I have signed up with Optus (Australia’s number 2 phone and internet supplier for non Aussie readers). As part of the package they supplied a Huawei E169 USB modem. It uses the 3G/GSM network to provide wireless broadband across much of Australia or at least the settled parts.

So how to get it working with Linux? As usual the phone companies deny it will work but what do they know? First I set it up installing the supplied sim card. Next after turning off wi-fi on the laptop I plugged the modem in. It recognised it as a USB device and asked what I wanted to do with it. I elected “do nothing” and then clicked on the Network Manager icon in the panel.

Network Manager showed the GSM device and offered to connect. I clicked and SELinux gave an error and blocked the action. After setting SELinux to permissive I tried again. The light flashed encouragingly and I opened Firefox and surfed away. It was literally that easy.

I expected to fiddle for a while but no it all worked boringly easily. I’m using it to post this now. Only “problem” so far is getting Conky to display the connections details. If only everything was that simple but then I wouldn’t have much to talk about here would I?

More on Raw

It occurred to me that I hadn’t posted anything on photography for a while. All of my posts have been about Linux. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that! As a step to add something photographic I thought I would post an update on how I handle raw images.

I have been shooting raw almost exclusively for quite sometime however I always rebooted into WIndows and used either the supplied camera software or Adobe Camera Raw to edit them and create jpgs. I tried UFRaw with the Gimp a long time ago and it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get the images to look the way I wanted. I experimented with a couple of other raw converters too but nothing produced as good a result as the Window software.

Recently though that changed. When I updated to the 64 bit version of Fedora 8 I installed UFRaw again and tried it out. I found it greatly improved. It recognised the raw format from both my cameras, a Canon 400D and my old Fuji S5500. The Fuji in particular is not handled well in Linux. It is only recognised as an external USB device but I can still transfer images from it. As DCRaw can now handle the format digiKam and others can display the images. UFRaw can be thought of as a front end for DCRaw conversions.

The results are that I no longer need to use Windows to work with raw images. This simplifies my photo workflow and means I have one less reason to keep XP alive on my system.

Managing Applications

One of the great things about Linux is the almost limitless range of applications. Name a requirement and someone has developed an application for it. The hardest part is probably selecting what you want / need. Each distro includes some way to manage the apps it provides, they are known as Package Managers, most have several. A Linux user has a choice of command line or graphical Package Managers.

One of my complaints when I started using Fedora was the default package manager, Pirut, found on the menus as “Add/Remove Software”. I found it slow and not very friendly. Oh it worked I can’t complain about it but like most Fedora users I quickly found the command line option yum was easier. Yum is fine if you know exactly what you want to install but what if you need to search. There are command line options but a graphical interface is so much easier. That is where Yumex comes in.

Yumex, the Yum EXtender, is a gui for the yum command. It has all the power of the command line including the feedback on what it is doing, but with the ease of use of a graphical interface. Why it isn’t the default for Fedora beats me. It seems to be a secret you only find out about on the forums, one of the good reasons to be a member of the forum for your distro of choice.

Yumex can be installed from the standard repositories in your preferred way but soon your preferred way will be yumex, highly recommended.

Refining Desktop Effects

I’ve written a couple of times before about desktop effects and the how to set them up. I won’t cover that again but will add a couple of things I have learned since then.

There are options

First is Compiz Options. These are found by right clicking on the Fusion Icon in the Panel. There are two options and one I use is Loose Binding. Not sure how it works but it does make a difference to performance, at least with my nVidia card. When it wasn’t selected performance was slow and X was working flat out, taking up around 30% of the cpu. With Compiz using about 15 – 20% that was quite a load. Now compiz is about 25 – 30% and X rarely over 1%.

There were other benefits too. I often found the screen totally messed up when resuming from Suspend. The only fix was to reload Window Manager, again using the Fusion Icon. Now that problem has disappeared.

I guess the lesson here is test the options, the other one is indirect rendering, and see if they improve Compiz on your computer.

Pager

The second thing is the pager. I use KDE 3.5 on Fedora 8. That is the bar that shows the number of desktops you have and allows you to click on one to bring it to the front. The standard pager refused to show the four desktops, it was stuck on one. I removed it and installed the KDE one designed for compiz, kicker-compiz. After adding it to the panel I had four desktops showing again.

As an aside there is a great option in Compiz called Window Preview. You will find it in ccsm under Extras. It shows the contents of a window in the Pager as well as when you hover over the application name on the Taskbar.