Wireless, video annoyances & upgrade woes

[Brian Kemp]

To sum up about 7-8 messages on the digest:


The intel ipw2100 chipset seems to require non-redistributable
firmware;  however the license may have changed on that recently. You
might want to check your dmesg to see if it complains about firmware
not loaded (the broadcom b43 chipset drivers do) or linuxwireless.org
for more info. I remember the OpenBSD guys complaining about this a
while back (they'll include redistributable firmware blobs by default;
they couldn't put ipw2100 in as Intel hid it behind a EULA.)

ndiswrapper certainly works, I guess; not my preferred solution by a
longshot (again, EULA).

FWIW, I've never had a problem with in-place upgrades; this may be
because I don't use 3rd party repositories, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader,
Binary-Only video drivers and other things people like to install.
That stuff tends to wreak havoc with upgrades. I'd remove the repo
references and roll back to Free drivers for the duration of the
upgrade. The Free stuff can be tested (and is); the binary stuff not
as much.

Re: reinstalling; I really do wish the default installer would force
/home to be a separate partition, though--that would make it easy to
upgrade-as-reinstall and keep all your settings. Next time you
reinstall, split your drive roughly like this: half for /, half for
/home, and a 1GB or so swap partition to keep the installer from
complaining (research the best size: I keep hearing "same size as RAM"
these days).

You can twiddle the sizes, but on a huge hard disk like 160GB: if you
can fill 80GB on *either* side, you might want to start thinking about
a NAS or at least some serious backups.

re: Linux Mint: It probably isn't legal without patent licenses
(IANAL). There's a *reason* those codecs are left out, and it's not
because Ubuntu hates you--it's because the people who made those
codecs want to get paid. (Or in the case of CSS, they don't want you
to view the movie unless it's on their terms, with unskippable
sections and region locking and patronizing copyright infringement
warnings.)

--BK
Sometimes it comes down to convenience or Freedom.
Sometimes choosing Freedom brings you unexpected convenience.