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We got it wrong again, this time with Joplin, Wi-fi woes spoiling Linux, Amiga Format to come back, and virtual Jonni fun.
Why oh Fi?
As a computer engineer who frequently gets asked “What do I do about Windows 7?” Your cover story on LXF259 titled ‘Escape Windows’ was of great interest as an alternative. I therefore chose one of my lesser used laptops and proceeded to install POP!_OS on it, as a dual boot with a trial of Windows 10.
Windows 10 had installed okay. Linux, however, didn’t. It ran fine as a basic system, but under no circumstances would it find any kind of Wi-fi that was available.
I persevered, and discovered that the fitted Wi-fi card was not supported in the basic install. Once I changed the card the problem was resolved when I next booted up. I am forever amazed by the inability of Linux to detect certain hardware; funnily enough it behaves in this respect just like Windows 7 used to.
The developer’s site was also unhelpful. I admit my knowledge of Linux is fairly basic, as the whole point of this exercise was to broaden it, but I cannot believe (a) how difficult it is to install drivers in Linux, and (b) how little support there is out there when you come across problems like these.
Is there a troubleshooting guide available for Linux installations, and a dummies’ guide to installing drivers and applications? Lee Cooke
Neil says…
You’re not the only person to run into these issues, and I’m sure you’re correct that many people will just give up at this point. It’s why most long-term Linux users will have a USB Wi-fi dongle that they know works in their drawers… that sounds wrong.
Distros are stuck between a rock and a hard place with proprietary drivers, as technically they can’t ship them by default – the user has to opt in for them, similar to video/audio codecs – legally speaking.
In the defence of Linux, whose job is it to ensure that random different chipsets and devices work out of the box with the Linux kernel? The hardware developer would have to develop the driver in the first place and then make it available, and ideally submit the source to the kernel under the right licence for it to work out of the box.
Microsoft has done a solid job of setting up programmes to get drivers submitted – because it’s the main consumer OS of choice, you can understand why perhaps cheaper hardware developers focus only on Windows support. But Windows is as likely to have flaky support as Linux in these areas.
POP!_OS is based on Ubuntu, so much of the same troubleshooting applies. You’d run: lspci -nnk | grep -i net is
That should list the networking device, and you would then have to track down and install the driver from the repository, which is all a bit of a palaver, I admit. In terms of troubleshooting guides that are available, Ubuntu offers this useful guide online: http://bit.ly/lxf262driver.
Joplin correction
In LXF260 Mike Mccallister provided a tutorial on installing and using the note-taking app Joplin. I have been a user of this excellent program for some time now and find it an excellent multi-platform program with a great and enthusiastic community of users and developers.
In his tutorial Mike suggests that when selecting a password “it needs to be secure enough for others not to guess, but easy enough to remember that you can enter it every time your device synchronises.”
With Joplin you only need to enter the E2EE password when you set up and sync a device for the first time. Thereafter E2EE is automatic and transparent. My E2EE password is horrendously complex so I am glad Joplin does not actually work as Mike suggests! David Poulton
Neil says…
Thanks for pointing that out, good to know!
Virtual Jonni
Let’s assume that Jonni is my hero, so I want to spurn Windows and go straight Linux, running and maintaining five distros (Arcolinux, Fedora, M4 Linux, Mint, and Ubuntu) each on its own logical volume until my skills improve enough to finally make Arch my b***h.
Since I still want to actually be productive, is it feasible to put, on a separate LV, a single /home folder used by all five distros, thus keeping my active files centralised? Chris Williams
Jonni says…
I’m not sure I’m a worthwhile role model – terrible organisational skills, y’know. The real hero of Linux
Format is Sifu Hernandez, Linux user, salsa master, deadly samurai and Fight Club lead anarchist.
I do recommend having lots of distros installed though, and LVS are the, well, logical way to do this. Sharing a home directory seems like a good idea, but then you realise you’ll have different versions of the same program all trying to write to the same place in your home folder (all those directories beginning with a dot). This might not break anything – some applications are good at dealing with config files in older formats – but it will result in strange behaviour sooner or later.
Still, it’s obviously nice to have a place for files that is easily available across LVS, so instead of sharing the whole /home directory why not make another LV to use as a data store. You could make symlinks to it from each of the separate /home directories if you wanted, but that’s not really necessary. I have my storage mounted this way at /mnt/storage and I just make handy bookmarks to this location in the Gnome and KDE file managers to get at it. It hasn’t let me down yet. My
Nextcloud directory is mounted in here too, so this doesn’t need to be updated every time I boot to a different distro.
Amiga Format
Could you review Linux running on an Amigaone X5000 and mention Amiga OS 4.1. Amigakit might want to supply a review copy, but I am not certain of this. Ian Learmonth
Neil says…
Thanks for the suggestion but that seems like a really expensive way to run Linux. £1,800 for a dual-core 2GHZ Powerpc system, which is not much faster than a 10-year old budget PC… For all my fond memories of the Amiga, Amigaos is also proprietary, which is also something we wouldn’t cover directly unless we’re emulating it. I’m not saying that people wouldn’t be interested in this, but it’s not something we’d cover in the magazine – i.e. open source or Linux-related.