Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex experience.

I am at Bhubaneswar and using my daughter's old desktop. This can be called old because it arrived with 128 MB RAM and another 512 MB was added 3 years ego on my advice. This desktop is not used by my daughter but my granddaughter who will be 3 years old next month. I have installed Ubuntu in dual boot with XP on it starting with version 5.04. In fact two partitions are dedicated to Ubuntu on this machine.

It already had Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Dapper Drake. I decided to remove Dapper and install Intrepid Ibex and downloaded RC because I may be leaving this place after Diwali.

Generally I don't burn any CD for installing Ubuntu (or any other distribution unless essential). I copied the Live CD to a spare partition and edited grub to boot.

Normal Live session produced blank screen. I added "xforcevesa" to the kernel line in grub and could boot into Live session and tried to install.

Ubiquity failed to detect the hard disk partitions which I promptly reported on Ubuntuforums. Then I found a new option "Create a USB startup disk" in System/Administration. I used it and it copied the Live CD to the USB stick.

After setting BIOS to boot from "USB-HDD" I could boot into another Live session after selecting "Safe Graphics Mode" on boot menu. Ubiquity failed to detect the hard disk once again. Meanwhile, there was a reply to my post on Ubuntuforums that in case I was booting from hard disk partition, it gets mounted at /cdrom and hard disk partitions (of that disk) are not detected by Ubiquity..

Since I had not deleted Live CD from the hard disk partition, it was getting mounted at /cdrom although, I was booting from USB stick (Funny Linux). I reformatted the partition and rebooted and this time Ubiquity detected all hard disk partitions.

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex replacing Dapper Drake.

But I was not happy with vesa driver. I replaced it with intel in xorg.conf. I could get up to GDM login screen and system hangs with blank screen. I had to do hard reset.
I booted into the Hardy Desktop and looked at /var/log/Xorg.0.log (of Intrepid) and found many lines with this error at the tail:
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.

I added openbox and found that I could login to openbox session with intel driver without any problem and concluded that I should disable visual effects on Gnome. I posted once again on Ubuntuforums and was advised to remove compiz and compiz-core.

I went into single user mode and removed compiz and compiz-core which removed many other packages related to compiz.

Now I could boot into Gnome with intel driver.

NB: While using vesa driver I did update and upgrade before removing compiz. It can be concluded that compiz is not working on intel driver as on updates till now.

Setting up Home Network on SIEMENS SL2_141 Wireless Router.

Today I have set up Home Network consisting of two Laptops and one Desktop on SIEMENS SL2_141 Wireless Router at my daughter's residence in Bhubaneswar.

The Router arrived with default settings in Bridge Mode. In Bridge Mode ISP userid and password is supposed to be given from the computer, therefore, only one machine could be connected to internet. I tested the internet connection through one Laptop and then used it to configure the router to alter the WAN settings from Bridge Mode to PPPoE. After changing the mode and rebooting the router it logged into ISP account and surfing could be done from the two Laptops and the Desktop connected through NIC to the router.

The next step was to prevent the neighbor from surfing the net on his Laptop using our router. The router was showing the MAC addresses of the two connected Laptops. I entered the MAC numbers in the MAC Filter and enabled the filter allowing access only to these machines.

I also changed the Admin password of the router, otherwise, a smart neighbor could easily disable the Mac filter of the router and surf from his Laptop.

I feel I have secured the Home network.