Posted by gmendoza on June 3, 2007 under Tech Tips | 
WARNING! THIS POST HAS BEEN MARKED AS OUTDATED!
While there may be useful information still contained within the article, there may be other more relevant articles out on the Internet. Please pay close attention to version numbers of software that this article refers to. If you're not careful, you could break your system if you do not understand what you are doing. If you would like to see this article updated, please contact the site administrator using the Contact page. Thanks!
UPDATE (11-04-2008): NetworkManager 0.7 has been introduced with Ubuntu 8.10. This major overhaul includes native support for Mobile Broadband card as shown in the screen-shots below. The great news is that virtually all CDMA cards work right out of the box with no configuration necessary. Thank you, NetworkManager developers! I suggest upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu, or use the NetworkManager PPA or SVN to at least upgrade to version 0.7.
ORIGINAL POST: Great news! The internal Dell Wireless 5700 Mini PCI Express Card for use with CDMA/EVDO networks is very easy to get working with Linux. The following tutorial was written for Ubuntu 7.04 (and works with 7.10 Gutsy), but the procedures are essentially the same for most Linux distributions. Please consult with your distribution documentation to assist with any differences.
Here’s how to get it going. Read more of this article »
Posted by gmendoza on June 1, 2007 under Tech Tips |
If you’re an avid user of Ubuntu or other Debian based Linux distributions, then you’re probably very familiar with using APT and it’s related command line utilities. You might however find it useful to create some command line aliases that shorten the time it takes to type out these repetitive tasks.
For example,
"sudo apt-get update" can be shortened to "agu".
"sudo apt-get install" can be shortened to "agi".
"sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" can be shorted to "agd".
A very simple way to create a set of command line aliases would be to add them to your ~/.bashrc file located in your users home directory. Here’s an example of some of my favorite APT aliases.
# Favorite Aliases
alias agu='sudo apt-get update'
alias agi='sudo apt-get install'
alias agd='sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'
alias agr='sudo apt-get remove'
alias ags='sudo aptitude search'
alias agsh='sudo apt-cache show'
alias afs='sudo apt-file search'
alias afsh='sudo apt-file show'
alias afu='sudo apt-file update'
To apply the changes immediately to your bash profile without having to log out, simply run the following command:
. .bashrc
Now, if you want to install the “vim-full” package, simply issue the following command:
agi vim-full
Remember, because “sudo” has been added to your alias, you don’t have to type it every time. It will prompt you to use the password the first time, and won’t ask again for the duration of the defined timeout period. Cool?
“apt-file” is a very useful package you should install. The alias is defined above, but is not installed by default. It allows you to search for file names in all packages from all your defined repositories. For example, lets say you’ve tried to run an application and it claims that your’re missing the library “libstdc++.so.5.0.7″. The following example tells you which packages contains a file with that name, which you can then install.
afs libstdc++.so.5.0.7
libstdc++5: usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.7
libstdc++5-3.3-dbg: usr/lib/debug/libstdc++.so.5.0.7
agi libstdc++5
Although these examples have been geared towards Debian and Ubuntu, you can obviously use aliases on any Unix-like operating system. The technique of applying them just varies depending on the shell environment you are using. Have fun!