I only just started trying to use twitter again in the past week or so, and my desktop client has recorded at least 3 or 4 outages in the past week. Between that, and now this news, I think I’m just going to give up. What are they planning to do — add Sandy-like features to twitter? Why? To attract more users, insuring that their availability will sink to zero-nines? Blech.

First, I had Ubuntu installed, and I was never able to keep the wireless card working consistently. To be honest, Ubuntu is the best distro I’ve had on this thing so far. Next, I gave OpenSUSE 11 a shot, and there’s been no end to the issues. Of course, it started with the wireless card. I have an Intel 3945ABG wireless card, according to lspci and dmesg output. In fact, here’s my lspci output right here:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566MM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HBM (ICH8M-E) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
15:00.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ba)
15:00.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)
15:00.2 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 21)
15:00.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev ff)
15:00.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 11)
15:00.5 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 11)

I’m running the KDE4 desktop, and tried using the default NetworkManager icon that’s in the systray to get things working. From what I saw there, it appeared that my card wasn’t scanning. I put in my network details manually, and tried to connect, and it failed with no errors. In the NetworkManager log there was lots of output, but nothing particularly useful. It just said the association took to long and that it was now marking that connection as ‘invalid’. Great. So here I am, trying to use Linux on the desktop, and only 5 minutes after the very first system boot, I’m tailing log files and debugging, and basically playing sysadmin, which is exactly what I don’t want to be doing on my desktop system. Restart NetworkManager, see what dhclient is doing, reboot, check /etc/modprobe.d, lsmod…. fail. Now what?

Well, I opened kwifimanager, and it said that I had indeed associated with an access point. So… I *am* scanning? Hmm. I had no IP address, so I figured I had probably fat-fingered my WEP settings somewhere. Tailing /var/log/messages agrees, saying WEP decryption is failing. So I double-check everything, all looks normal and correct to me, I try again, and No Bueno. *sigh*.

Finally, I reverted to command-line tactics, and ran this little line:

iwconfig wlan0 essid <myssid> key <mykey>

Magically, it works, where all of the GUI nonsense had failed. Now here’s a question: how the hell do you get this to “just work” at boot time? Well, I had about 10 emails to send to clients, so I put that question off and fired up a browser and…. fail. WTF?

I had an IP address, pinged my router, pinged another host on the network, all good. Pinged an external IP I know by heart, fail. Ugh. Ran ‘cat /etc/resolv.conf’ — empty. Apparently, dhclient didn’t update the information it got from my router. It also didn’t update when I set the domain in NetworkManager to ‘home’, because it still said ’search site’. I added the proper lines in there, and tried again in the browser… fail. Now what?!?

Ran ‘netstat -rn’. I don’t have a default gateway. *sigh*…

route add default gw 192.168.1.1

And I finally have internet access.

Of course, I can’t work 24 hours a day, so I went to bed, and left my laptop running so I could get right back to work in the morning. Or not.

I had foolishly chosen to use an OpenGL screensaver. Overnight, it completely locked up the machine, rendering it useless without forcibly rebooting it. So much for getting right back to work.

Well, let’s see if I can get some of these issues fixed by updating the software, since I’m now at least connected to the internet (of course, after the forced reboot, I had to do the iwconfig->route add routine again). Ran the updater, picked some extra repositories, and it goes off to set things up. Unfortunately, it also prompts me to import probably 50 or so GPG keys. Annoying. More annoying is, after all of that, it fails to update any of my software, even though it tells me there are updates available. Why you ask? Here’s what I got…

Failed to mount cd:///?devices=/dev/sr0 on /var/adm/mount/AP_0x00000001: No medium found (mount: No medium found)

Click ok. Get same error again. Click ok. Get slightly different error…

Unexpected exception. Failed to mount cd:///?devices=/dev/sr0 on /var/adm/mount/AP_0x00000001: No medium found (mount: No medium found)

Click Ok, get another message…

Please file a bug report about this. See http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper#Troubleshooting for instructions.

I go there, the URL isn’t valid. I find the Troubleshooting page on my own, and there’s a bunch of generic troubleshooting information there. More command line sysadmin-ish stuff in there. Just the kind of stuff I don’t need to be spending otherwise billable time on. I give up and decide that I’ll just deal with it in its broken-ass state for the next 10 hours or so until I can get my beloved MacBook Pro back.

All of that said, I’d like to explore other avenues, because I don’t like that there’s, like, zero flexibility in how the Google Reader interface is configured. My problem starts with large fonts…

I use relatively large fonts. If you increase the font twice up from the default size in firefox on a mac (using the cmd-+ keystroke, twice), and you have more than just a couple of feeds, you wind up with this really horrible side pane with the bottom half of it requiring a scroll bar, and the text wraps, and it just looks terrible. What makes this really REALLY REALLY annoying is that:

1. I don’t use the features included in the *top* part of the side pane, ever, at all (like ‘trends’ and stuff), and
2. You can’t resize or disable that part of the side pane.

I’ve used folders and some other features to try to alleviate the issue, but it’s just a compromise, and I’d rather not do that if something else would work better for me. I’ve had a couple of quick glances at just a couple of other readers, but I thought I’d get some input from the lazyweb to see what your thoughts are. Is there a browser-based feed reader that has some of Google’s niceties, but perhaps with a little bit nicer/more configurable interface? Out of curiosity, are you using a Mac-compatible fat-client reader that just totally r0cks in some way? If so, let me know in the comments.

Maybe this is a ploy by Apple to actually sell off all of their refurbs and clearance items in a hurry, and then they’ll offer the option on the new MBPs.

This experience has shown me something interesting about myself and my stance toward Linux on the desktop. I’ve run Linux on desktops for about 10 years. In the past 2 years it’s been less often, because that’s around the time I started making friends with the Mac. Over that time, I have apparently reached the point where I will sooner deal with the glossy screen nonsense than go back to using Linux on the desktop full time.

If Apple provides nothing else of value to the Linux community, they at least serve as a proof of concept that, if hardware compatibility is removed from the equation completely, UNIX-based machines can be extremely successful desktops.