Linus comes to his senses

According to a link on Slashdot, Linus Torvalds has finally come to his senses and now agrees with me that Gnome is a better choice for a desktop than KDE.

Illegal Use of Linux in the Classroom

A teacher in Austin, TX did not like what she saw when she found a student in her class experimenting with a liveCD from HeliOS.. so she confiscated the CD, reprimanded the student and then wrote a letter to his after explaining he was potentially liable to a civil suit and that the kids should be using Microsoft products which they (MS) would be happy to supply for free..

Wow.

Breathlessly awaiting the followup after the teacher and the parent meet in the superintendent's office.

Starting a wireless interface properly

I added WPA-PSK to my router recently (the wireless connection has been open up to now) and that immediately caused problems because my Linux laptop (running FC6) didn't want to play nice. My shiny new MacBook had no problems (no surprise there).

After some rummaging around, I found that I needed to start wpa_supplicant so I tried that using the init script but had no success. After some more poking, I edited

1. /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf (to set the passphrase generated by wpa_passphrase)
2. /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant (to change the default driver from ndiswrapper to wext

and created ifup-pre-local and ifdown-pre-local to start and stop wpa_supplicant respectively. These get called from /sbin/ifup and /sbin/ifdown and can be contain anything you want run before bringing up the wireless connection. Mine look like this:

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/init.d/functions

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
. ./network-functions

. /etc/init.d/functions

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
. ./network-functions

CONFIG=`echo ${1} | cut -d- -f2`

need_config ${CONFIG}

source_config

if [ "${TYPE}" = "Wireless" ]
then
/etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant restart
fi

Presto! My wireless interface now comes up just like it should!
Now I have to figure how to setup wpa-supplicant for when I am away from my home network..