fix up wireless on opensuse, and some thought on it

One of my friends is having problem getting the wireless working his laptop. Which he install opensuse 10.2 and the wireless is a intel ipw2200 card. The thing is the driver is open source, but the firmware is not. So it is not installed by default. And he have no internet connection yet, and only have 5 cd, meaning no non-oss cd. This will be a bit tough.

Since I have basically use suse for the first time, second time, first is 9.2. which i use for a short while anyway. First thought, when boot up, it shows a graphical grub menu. More importantly, it shows an option to boot opensuse on xen, which is cool. Because assuming he uses only the default, it means that virtualization is free, comes into opensuse as an option by default. And the interface is ok.

On the other hand, unlike ubuntu, they didn't come with the wireless firmware, need to install manually, which is a pain. And I can't get use to the Yast configuration. maybe i got used to apt-get. It is a bit confusing to me, because I got used to the way kubuntu do things.

been playing with linux system accounting

One day I play around on my laptop, which I found the acct utilities, which I wonder when I install. Anyway, later I found out what it is. Actually it is a unix system accounting. Which contain a few utilities, such as:
- sa
- ac
- lastcomm

So play around I did. So I start with sa. Which I get a set of statistics of io, memory and cpu usage.

7924 800.15re 18.51cp 0avio 2835k
55 262.28re 17.77cp 0avio 2848k ***other*
46 53.41re 0.30cp 0avio 8430k gdl_indexer
47 1.55re 0.16cp 0avio 2079k apport
21 0.32re 0.13cp 0avio 6228k mono
46 0.68re 0.08cp 0avio 8430k gdl_indexer*
29 0.12re 0.02cp 0avio 478k gzip
2619 1.12re 0.01cp 0avio 514k file
2 0.04re 0.01cp 0avio 936k vrms
4 0.57re 0.00cp 0avio 2317k apache2
10 0.30re 0.00cp 0avio 704k dhclient-script
11 50.67re 0.00cp 0avio 0k pdflush*
12 0.11re 0.00cp 0avio 573k gpgv
2 0.01re 0.00cp 0avio 4346k kde-config
2 0.01re 0.00cp 0avio 1210k troff
----output truncated--------

which not really sorted. So later i found out a parameter for sa, --sort-cpu-avmem

8484 804.23re 18.61cp 0avio 2808k
7 0.20re 0.00cp 0avio 28526k pidgin*
922 0.01re 0.00cp 0avio 19963k beagled-helper*
26 0.12re 0.04cp 0avio 19648k totem-video-ind
49 57.01re 0.33cp 0avio 8457k gdl_indexer
49 0.69re 0.08cp 0avio 8457k gdl_indexer*
6 374.57re 0.00cp 0avio 6753k apache2*
21 0.32re 0.13cp 0avio 6228k mono
2 0.01re 0.00cp 0avio 4346k kde-config
56 262.28re 17.78cp 0avio 2793k ***other*
10 0.10re 0.00cp 0avio 2374k smbd*
4 0.57re 0.00cp 0avio 2317k apache2
----output truncated--------

which interesting because, pidgin take 28meg of memory, or i read wrong. most of the time I get firefox using 50meg.

another interesting command is lastcomm. which display the last command executed.

-----above line deleted------------
find root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
xargs root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
rm root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
find root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
acct root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
acct root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
acct root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07
accton S root ?? 0.00 secs Sun Aug 12 09:07

which I didn't fully explore yet. lastly is the ca utility. which can display the amount of time a user log in to the system, for a week.

which all of this is new to actually.

Discovered unix system accounting tools

So I was browsing around my laptop, which by incident found, acct. Which is a set of unix system accounting tools. Which from documents stored on my laptop, have:
- accton: which use to turn on/off system accounting
- ac: to show user connect time
- sa: summarize system accounting info.
- lastcomm: which printout previously executed command.
:
ac, is to print out user connect info. Which if executed directly just print out:

sweemeng@sweemeng-laptop:~$ ac
total 82.92

which really nothing, but it have a few parameter

data matrix, huh

I was browsing around the web, stumble upon something that is new to me, data matrix.
more about data matrix here and here. Basically it is something like a bar code, that store info from a few byte to 2 kilo bytes. And is used as bar code, to identify object at a warehouse.
,
It seems that a few website, including nokia and this guy. Use it to encode data. It seems that nokia concept, is to encode the something, such as links or text. then expose it somewhere, then read it using a camera phone, with software of course.

Which I have my own.





it seems that there is reader provided in the links above.

There is other use of this as well, such.
http://www.semapedia.org/

Also there is a few library that can used to generate or decode the code.
http://barcode4j.krysalis.org/ (this is in java)
http://www.libdmtx.org/ (this is for linux, but unfortunately, it got sued by a patent troll, we we cannot download it)

which i should try to play around with it.