D-Link DWA-525 A2 on Ubuntu 12.04

Trying to make a newly bought D-Link Wireless N 150 PCI Desktop Adapter DWA-525 A2 work under Ubuntu 12.04 (precise). References like this blog post that refer to drivers from the Ralinktech website do not work for the A2 version of the device. You can find out, what version you have through

lspci |grep -i ralink

which for the A2 should give:

05:03.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. Device 5360 

Wikidevi references a patch to the rt2800pci module (part of the rt2x00 driver) but I found no explanation on how to apply this to a Ubuntu 12.04, and it took some time to find out. The patch seems to apply to Kernel 3.4, but Precise uses 3.2. Ubuntuforums has a thread on the topic and one posting explains how to patch a download of compat-wireless for kernel 2.6 manually.

Instead of going that route, I wanted to give the patch for the 3.4. version a try, and on the way document a solution that would be easier to reproduce. The compat-wireless releases can be found at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download/stable/ , the patch is linked from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/pipermail/users_rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/2012-May/004942.html . Putting that together:

wget http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/pipermail/users_rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/attachments/20120507/e2072201/attachment.bin
wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-3-stable/v3.4/compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1.tar.bz2
tar -xjf compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1.tar.bz2
cd  compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1
patch -p1 <../attachment.bin
./scripts/driver-select rt2x00
make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo modprobe rt2800pci

With this, the card should be recognized and start to work. I suspect that the compilation of the module has to be redone each time, the kernel is upgraded.

Make use of a resized disc in a virtualized Ubuntu (LVM)

In Ubuntu 12.04 running as a guest in VirtualBox on a Windows host, I needed extended disk space.
Resiszing the disc was easy:

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe"  modifyhd Ubuntu.vdi --resize 16000

But how make the guest system effectively use the additional space, if the disc is used with LVM? It took me some time to understand that several steps are needed due to the layered architecture of LVM. Execute following steps as root

1. Create a new logical partition with fdisk and give it type 8e (sda is the device name under which Ubuntu recognizes the disk)

   fdisk /dev/sda
   

2. Create a physical volume from the new partition (sda6 is the device name for the new partition)
   

   pvcreate /dev/sda6
   

3. Add the new physical volume to a volume group (ubuntu is its name, you can find it out with vgdisplay)

   vgextend ubuntu /dev/sda6

4. Extend the logical volume with the space now available (/dev/mapper/ubuntu-root is the path of the logical volume)

   lvextend /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root /dev/sda6

5. Make the file system aware of its new dimension

   sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root

Linux on my laptop

Using Linux on the Desktop since 1999, I was quite excited about my first Linux laptop I bought last week. I have always been reluctant to deal with the different problems that normally arise when you replace a Windows system tuned by the manufacturer for the device through a Linux distribution of your choice. So buying a HP 635, with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop ready to be installed, I thought being save of such problems. Effectively, once finished the installation, all system cyomponents worked as expected including wlan.
My satisfaction about what seems to me being a remarkable technical progress of Linux on laptops, and about the availability of devices sold with Linux instead of Windows, nevertheless got tainted by the very unclear terms under which this device is sold by HP. I have no problem with SLED being a commercial distribution, but neither on the distributor's website, nor in the documents accompanying the machine, I found any indication of what services I got entitled to by bying the product. Neither was there any manual or physical installation medium included. Registering the product at Novell's support center, you get confronted with a field for a licence key, which is not provided with the product either. Although you can leave the field blank, I found it nonetheless confusing. Only some googling revealed the information, that support and updates  would be provided for 90 days, and extension to this duration provided as HP Care packages. While this all makes sense to me for a system sold to enterprises, I imagine selling it to private users curious about Linux, but not proficient with it, and not familiar with the distinction between free software and free beer, must lead to confusion and frustration.

Finally I decided to replace SLED with Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) which started the second part of the adventure. The wlan was no longer actionable through the wlan key (f12). "rfkill list" revealed that the "phy0" device stayed "hard blocked". For those reading this while confronted with the same issue: The solution that finally worked after some hours of mounting frustration consisted in booting the device from a 11.04 live CD, which allows to unblock phy0. After rebooting back into 12.04, wlan works flawlessly!

Linux as difficult to use

An article on opensource.com brought a comic on The Oatmeal to my attention, comparing how users are expected to deal with problems in different operating systems.
Coincidentally yesterday evening, I had to fix a problem on a Windows 7 Lenovo laptop where the preinstalled Microsoft Office 2010 Starter refused to work with a bizarre error message (“Click2Run Configuration Failure”). While there is no official workaround from Microsoft, the fix documented by Steve Schardein implies three reboots.
What I consider interesting about these images of the typical user of Windows, Mac, and Linux, is not so much how they are determined by technical qualities of the OS, but how they imply socially constructed ways of dealing with technology:

• rebooting as a kind of magic reinitialization of a machine
• the expert at the Apple store as an authority deciding about the fate of a machine
• the solitary tinker completely loosing his reference to time and space

These attitudes do not exist in isolation, and are no longer exclusively tied to one OS, but in our imagination we still like to think about the typical user in that way. Technology is always used in a social context, and users learn to deal with problems in that context. That's why discussions about what OS one should recommend to one's grandmother seem limited to me when they concentrate on technical merits of the OS and its UI, but need to deal with how users learn to make use of resources in there context when they encounter problems. And these resources are not limited to functionality and documents that are part of the OS, but equally important are social relations to other users online and offline.