My first major foray into Gnu/Linux was with the Gentoo flavor. Some of my friends used Debian, but the whole idea of Gentoo just appealed more to me.

Once I knew a lot more of what was going on under the hood, I was attracted to Ubuntu for its focus on the desktop, while still running Gentoo on my servers.

I now run Ubuntu exclusively in my home network, where Linux boxen are concerned.

The point of this article is to say that though I run it exclusively, I don’t really see how lay users can use it. I still have to do a lot of things by hand that I shouldn’t.

The most glaring example that I have found is the built in Remote Desktop server/client combination. For whatever reason, this has never really worked well for me. One might think that the default settings would be optimized for Ubuntu > Ubuntu connections, but it doesn’t feel that way. Connecting to an Ubuntu server from Mac OS X using Jolly’s FastVNC is great. Connecting from tightvnc-client on Windows XP is fine. Connecting Karmic > Karmic is painful and useless.

Searching around, I found many suggestions for FreeNX by nomachine. This combination is very, very good. Best bet so far, but I haven’t figured out how to connect to the running session, on screen 0. It uses some voodoo and creates a login session over X. I think that we could do this anyway, but we would have to put it on another term? Not sure, but I’m pretty sure I logged in like this from putty using some win32 xserver.

Ok. So. Bottom line: got slow connections in Ubuntu > Ubuntu? For remote desktop software, get FreeNX.

For the record, the activity that I wanted to do using the desktop (of course I could have used command line) was cd burning and archiving. I wanted to use the GUI to more easily navigate files structures and create discs.

Here it is.

Not that impressive and from reading the reviews, it might be a cheap plastic piece of crap. I thought that mine was. I couldn’t get it to work under Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I don’t have any personal windows machines any more that aren’t virtual.

Anyway, I thought the thing was broken. Finally I had a look in dmesg and found something similar to this over here:

[ 8566.396539] rtusb init --->
[ 8566.396547] Error: Driver 'rt2870' is already registered, aborting...


Um. Yeah. So then I found another post over at the Ubuntu forums about this sort of thing confirming the need to blacklist modules.

This seems really whack, but maybe this helps other usb dongle cards work more stably or something. Anyway, sucks that a really nice, inexpensive dongle doesn’t work out of the box in the latest Ubuntu, seemingly the most popular desktop flavor of Linux. Ah well.

Anyway, go to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add the following:

blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2870sta

You might not need the second line, but I added it and mine works. Woot.

When I confirm some wireless N speeds, I will review the dongle on Newegg and link here.

As an aside, I think that Newegg and Rosewill would sell a lot more of these if they

1. advertised how to get it working
2. included an extension cable

Ok, so I just started a new contract and they have a no streaming radio policy. Fair enough, it is their bandwidth.

Basically I just wanted to point out that the n85 is capable of picking up local FM stations and will even download the local station guide for you.

Additionally, any internet radio with an m3u playlist type can be played (I think, I’m not sure what the exact requirements are). I am listening to my favorite Seattle station right now, c89.5.