Problems with my Intel Wifi 5100 on Linux

I've really had it with this laptop of mine. It was OK at its time, but now it's long time due. I'm getting a new system in a couple of months from now. I've really missed having a desktop computer these last few years.

But anyway... my Kubuntu 13.10 x86_64, or my wifi controller, or both, suddenly decided to make wifi networking impossible, all of a sudden. The wifi controller in question is an Intel 5100. The funny thing is that it appears that I do have the right firmware for it.

alex@asus:~$ lspci | grep Net
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100
alex@asus:~$ modinfo iwlwifi | grep ^firmware
firmware: iwlwifi-100-5.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-1000-5.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-135-6.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-105-6.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-2030-6.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-2000-6.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-5150-2.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-5000-5.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-6000g2b-6.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-6000g2a-5.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-6050-5.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-6000-4.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-3160-7.ucode
firmware: iwlwifi-7260-7.ucode

After some very frustrating research, I found a fix:

alex@asus:~$ sudo echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf

and a reboot did the trick for me.

Google Chrome theme fix on Linux

(Off-topic: this is my first post in more than two years on this blog! In the meantime, I learned to speak English better and I forgot most of my Linux know-how...)

Right, so Google inadvertently fscked things up with Chrome (which, with all its downsides, is still the best browser in my opinion) – with the Chrome themes, to be more precise. Since you normally get them via the Google Store, the ones that you've already tried out are displayed as being already installed. However, if you want to use an old (installed!) theme again... you might not be able to. It's shown as installed, but there's no means to choose it. You can't uninstall it either, since it's not an app, but a – erm – theme.

RapidShare Premium, wget and your download queue

So you just bought a RapidShare Premium account and would like to automatize fetching your link list? Here is a very raw solution with cookie-based authentication handled by wget and a download queue in the form of a plain text file.

How to split large files in Linux and *BSD

Suppose you have a large file that you need to "break down" to smaller pieces and then reconstruct. It's fairly simple, using the split command.

I will only give a brief usage example. For more information, check out man split (and info coreutils 'split invocation' on Linux).

Shockwave content on Linux

Suppose you have the misfortune of having to access a page which only provides its interactive content in Shockwave, not Flash or Java. A stupid, ugly and slow leftover of old Macromedia (just before they released Shockwave Flash) that should not be supported anymore, anywhere, in my opinion.

Keypad/Numpad gone mad in KDE4

I upgraded to KDE4 – Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

All was fine, excepting for the numerical keypad. My notebook's design includes this keypad which allows me to use the digits (when NumLock is on) and the other keys, respectively (Del, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Ins) – when the NumLock LED is off.

Core dumps

Since I'm interested in examining core dumps (in order to submit them to the ones developing the application that crashed) I prefer to keep core dumping enabled at all times on my systems.

Here is a brief hands-on to core dumps management.

mt-daapd / Firefly media server -- follow-up

A little while back I was talking very angrily about mt-daapd / Firefly media server.

It just so happened that it was 1) crashing and 2) apparently scanning outside of the directories I told it to scan in.

mt-daapd is not the answer

Depending on how lucky you are, mt-daapd / Firefly Media Server might or might not work for you.

The problem at hand is how to elegantly share media files in your LAN without resorting to NFS exports or Samba shares.

Migrating from KMail to Evolution

I've decided to give Gnome one more go (I've been a KDE user so far) so I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. What's more is that I decided to use only GTK applications, nothing Qt whatsoever. At least for a while, to see how it goes : )

So far, nothing but confusion. What was notable though was the painful migration of my e-mails from KMail to Evolution.

Asus Pro57Vr notebook (M51VR) and Linux

I bought this Asus Pro57Vr notebook (scroll and click "Specifications") about 10 days ago; it's reported as M51VR on Ubuntu.

It's very nice, for its price. Plus, I've grown fond of Asus over the past years, due to the great quality/price balance. After I've stuffed my desktop system with a lot of Asus components, I thought I'd buy a laptop from them as well.

Pidgin bug -- update

After more than half of year after noticing the issue and getting frustrated with the "can't set new Yahoo! avatar in Pidgin" bug, it seems that things have finally gotten a move on!

Triple boot pain

Today I went at a friend's place to help him set up a triple boot system. The PC is brand new and bleeding edge (it will be used primarily as a gaming device), but the guy was still curious about Linux. So I told him about Linux in general and offered to install Ubuntu. He agreed and we went on with the partitioning scheme.


The HDD had 500 GB and we agreed to set up the partitions as follows:

* primary partition - 50 GB - Vista Business x64
* primary partition - 50 GB - XP Professional x64
* primary partition - 25 GB - Kubuntu 8.04
* extended partition - ~375 GB
- 4 GB - Linux swap
- the rest - big storage partition

OK, so when all this was settled, I started the Vista install. It went OK, no troubles whatsoever. Then came Kubuntu - all went fine. I used GRUB in order to be able to choose between the two operation systems.

Manually modifying a .deb package

From time to time, you might be facing a binary .deb package that you have to tweak for suiting your own needs or for testing purposes. By "a binary .deb package" I mean the final .deb, with a few configuration files and pre/post-inst/rm scripts and not the source files for the .deb themselves.

So, what to do if you only want to change, say, the behavior of a postinst file and then have the .deb prepared for installation?

First of all, the .deb itself is a kind of an archive. This is why you can browse its contents while in mc, for instance ("Midnight Commander").

Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD and weird SATA HDD

Today I went at a friend's to help her set up a new PC in a dual boot configuration (Windows XP, which was already installed, and Kubuntu 8.04).

XP came preinstalled so I burned a CD with Kubuntu 8.04 and booted from it... just to find out that there was no normal way of detecting the HDD as device.

How to overlap two images using Gimp

Gimp - one of the greatest professional apps ever to be found out there... professional image manipulation software; and, of course, open source.

Too bad there are a lot of idiots in this world - starting with myself - who don't have the slightest clue on how to use it. I mean, I always loved photography and as a kid I used to play with my grandfather's "borrowed" old Zenit camera, but since photographic films were not cheap and I had no means of editing the photos, I quit. Since then, I've been planning... and planning to get a camera of my own, but since I don't want anything below a SLR - and a decent one is around 1,000 EUR - it'll have to wait. But that's another story...

Getting back to Gimp. My concrete problem was how to get two images of exact size (after adjusting their size such that they "fitted" the dimensions) overlap with an amount of transparency. I'm aware this must be an extremely easy task for anyone just a little bit more photo editing savvy than myself, but anyways - I had no clue what to do so after googling and reading a little bit, I found out.

I'm posting here the "short version", suitable for my concrete issue. (Such that I'll know next time where exactly to go to for instructions.)

Pidgin bug

While I have to admit that Pidgin is generally speaking a great multi-protocol IM (instant messaging) client, it's got its flaws too... just like any software. And I'm not talking here about the notorious developers / users scandal, resulting in a Pidgin fork because users just wanted a resizable text input field, while the developers said they don't care. I'm not even talking about the lack of voice and web cam support (there's a ticket from the beginning of time there... prioritized as minor).

Convert .flac files into .mp3

In order to convert .flac to .mp3, you'd need to do the following: first cd into the directory with the .flac files, then

for x in *.flac ; do OUTF=`echo "$x" | sed s/\.flac$/.mp3/g` ; flac -c -d "$x" | lame -m j -q 0 -V 0 -s 44.1 - "$OUTF" ; done

dpkg-reconfigure locales...

"Open source features" take N+1 :-)

On a Debian system,

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

would prompt you with a nice menu allowing you to select new locales... Unfortunately, this is not the case with Ubuntu. You just get to generate or update the already selected locales. This is actually an Ubuntu bug, confirmed (with status: wishlist).

Make Konqueror remember the default view

One of the 'features' of open-source is this phrase that I'm sure you heard at least once: "Well now... that's not a bug, it's a *feature*!" -- yeah, right!


One of those "features" is the fact that Konqueror doesn't seem to remember the default view I set up in any profile. Namely, when I use Konqueror as a file manager and type something in the address bar, such as ~/tmp, I really want it to display the contents of ~/tmp in "Detailed List View", the way I chose it as default! But it doesn't.