Linux Hates Me

Seriously. I now believe linux is a collective conciousness which has taken steps to punish me on a constant basis. You can take your weak monotheistic religions which offer some abstract punishment in an afterlife and shove them, the LinuxGod is punishing me on a daily basis. For hours at a time.

Today, on prompting by Michal, I downloaded SimplyMepis 6.5rc3 (64bit version), burned it to CD and tried to install it – hoping that its claimed hardware detection abilities would solve the problem with the USB WiFi dongle. Did it work? Not a chance. Mepis was good enough to not even be able to get a graphical interface working (I use a WinFast PX7600 GS which most other distros get working instantly). For some crazy reason, Mepis demands you log in as username:root password:root on first install (as if that provides any security..) but when I tried this from a console login, all I kept getting was “login incorrect.” After doing this for about 15 mins, I finally gave up. Yes, I am a glutton for the LinuxGod’s punishments.

As I was in a *Nix frame of mind now, I gave openSUSE (still installed) another shot. I wish I hadn’t.

Still no connected network.Once more, I went through the farce of trying to configure the Belkin USB dongle. I manually entered the WEP key numerous times. I deleted the Network card setting and re-entered it numerous times. The end result? Well, the little red “x” says it all…

When I try to view the connection information window, despite it thinking it is working (and it claims the Router wants me to enter the WEP Key…), I get this:

Screenshot - Active Connection Information

Not exactly confidence inspiring, is it? For completeness I gave recompiling the driver another shot. Following the steps as given on the Wiki, with the RT73 source files and on numerous other sites, I still only get as a far as:

make

which results in this page of nonsense:

Output of make command

As you can see, the LinuxGod truly, truly hates me. I might have to get a copy of OSX and install that instead… Either that or just allow the impending nervous breakdown take its toll… (Will try Solaris 10 next week, just for kicks)

[tags]Linux, SUSE, openSUSE, Mepis, SimplyMepis, Operating System, Technology, Wifi, Networking, Belkin, Open Source, Computers, OS X, Mac, Router, Solaris, Unix[/tags]

7 thoughts on “Linux Hates Me

  1. man mepis works great for me and I’m a total newb…everything except dma on my dvd drive, but I chalk that up to dell and its shoddy dvd players (lots of people have complained about them).

  2. Well – a blog is not the right way to ask for help in case of problems.
    You should try to enter a forum of your preferred distribution and ask for help. There you can easily provide the needed information (dmesg log and information if you use the ralink or the GPL driver, for example) and the people can comment to it. Also, there you could explain in detail which howtos and wikis you’ve followed.

    Currently, btw., the rt73 is reported to work on Ubuntu when you follow this howto close:
    help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/RalinkRT73
    It should easily work for other distributions as well – try to set up the GPL driver first (at the bottom of the page), if this doesn’t work try to take your shot on the other driver. But: read all comments first because they somtimes update the information of the article.

    Good luck anyway.

  3. PCLinuxOS should run fine as 32bit on a 64bit processor… I’ve never tried it but read good things.

    Anyways, ever consider that these problems could be related to the Hardware? Until vendors activly support kernel and driver development, a lot of this newer stuff is a bit hit-and-miss with initial functionality. Not until the parts are in the hands of an interested kernel programmer/patcher will a lot of this work… And, that actually ends up being rather quick, but maybe not quite today.

    Wireless has been notoriously difficult for me, even with older cards. Here is another guy’s rant:
    http://www.osweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2484
    But I’ve read that new kernel changes are due to make this a bit better some time over the next year… yeah, always over the rainbow…

  4. Partly Linux, partly your hardware.

    The Belkin USB dongle uses a chip made from RaLink in it; it can be a pain to get it working even in Windows (I have experience to this point).

    I ended up returning it and buying a PCI card instead. Linux was nice enough when I installed it to auto-connect the card and everything.

  5. Thank you for all the comments and advice.

    It is all helpful, and all appreciated. It is good to see the number of linux visitors here finally catch up with the number of Mac users ๐Ÿ™‚

    I am sure Mepis works fine for most people, but as I said here I appear to be under the curse of the LinuxGods. I have machines with 32bit SUSE and Ubuntu working fine (incidentally both use the same Belkin USB crap that I am trying to get working on this machine), but for various reasons (as basic as them being in different rooms) I wanted to try and get a 64bit version running on this PC.

    I will give PCLinuxOS a try this weekend, it seems reasonable and that URL goes a long way to filling me with confidence. I should point out though, that 32bit SUSE and Ubuntu support this WiFi crap out of the box as well (or at least they certainly created the illusion of doing it on the other machines ๐Ÿ™‚ )

    Also, I am sure the hardware is more than slightly to blame (although it did work out of the box in Windows.. ๐Ÿ™‚ ) and this was simply a blog rant rather than a direct cry for help. I am working through the different bits of advice I’ve had off the forums but it seems to be generally time consuming and so far still ineffective!

    I hadn’t found the http://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/RalinkRT73 article, but it looks good so I will give that a shot next time. Shame about the rain forests ๐Ÿ™‚

    Seriously, thank you to everyone for the advice here.

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