Switching to Fedora 10 and Wicd Wireless Network Manager

My last few posts have been pretty technical, so I thought I'd write an opinion piece for once, in case anyone cares. I've begun fiddling around with Linux again, and I went back to where I left off using Linux Mint, only I grabbed the new release of version 6. It felt essentially the same as Linux Mint 5, only this time it froze. A lot. Like more than it used to. I had the same problem with Ubuntu, and I know Mint is based on Ubuntu, so I decided to try an OS that wasn't Debian-based for once.

I downloaded the most recent version of Fedora, version 10. So far I really like it. I'm a big fan of GNOME, and I've found the switch relatively easy. I also noticed that I got a little more involved with the command line with Fedora, which is a good thing. I'm glad to learn more about the internal workings of a Linux distro, as it'll come in handy in the future.

My biggest project so far on Fedora has been trying to get the Wicd wireless network manager working. I hated the standard GNOME NetworkManager so I went looking for alternatives. The only problem was, after I installed Wicd 1.5.9, it wouldn't connect to WPA/WPA2 networks. After looking through some logs I determined that it was to do with an external command, wpa_supplicant not having enough privileges to do what it was supposed to. After lengthy conversations and help from the people on the Freenode #wicd IRC channel, I tried installing the release candidate for Wicd 1.6. One of the Wicd authors did some specific error-fixing for me before I got the latest revision. I also helped him uncover some other bugs. Anyway, it fixed my problem, but opened up a new one. Now Wicd would only connect if I restarted the daemon. It runs virtually identical with the same privileges from boot, but apparently it just doesn't want to work unless I restart it.

Anyway, it's been fun so far and I'm really getting stuck on Fedora.

Linux Mint/Ubuntu Overheating Laptop

Back when I tried Ubuntu, and later on when I tried Linux Mint, one of the biggest problems I noticed was their tendencies to heat up quite a bit and the fans run at maximum, even when running idle on my HP dv6568se laptop. It runs an Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.6 GHz.

After realizing that other people have had the same problem, I spent an afternoon Googling around for CPU frequency throttling and the different utilities that you can use. It took me a while until I found the right one. I have now throttled my CPU down to 1.0 GHz and the heat level isn't so bad anymore. Here's how I made mine work.

Modules you may or may not need in your /etc/modules file:

powernowd
cpufreq_ondemand
cpufreq_powersave
cpufreq_performance
cpufreq_conservative
cpufreq-userspace
battery
ac
processor
thermal
acpi-cpufreq

Then I installed kpowersave and cpufreq-utils from the package manager. I set kpowersave to run on startup by going to Control center, Sessions, and added it as a startup program.

Use cpufreq-info in a Terminal to see what frequency steps your processor is capable of, then use cpufreq-set -d [value in KHz] to set a minimum supported frequency and cpufreq-set -u [value in KHz] to set a maximum supported frequency. So the commands I used were:

cpufreq-info
cpufreq-set -d 1000000
cpufreq-set -u 1000000

Now my kpowersave utility reports the processor running at 1000 MHz and the heat problem has noticably improved.

How To Upload Files with Perl and CGI

I took me quite a while of sifting through the internet looking how to do this. I played with different CGI.pm functions, and so on, but eventually sort of improvised my own script based on what I've seen. This script takes a method="get" parameter of the form "c:\folder1\folder2\file.txt". It does not do any string sanitation or error checking, it just uploads the file. I had to edit the stupid HTML brackets because Blogger doesn't like me typing it there. You'll have to replace the (less/greater than sign) with the actual symbol. Feel free to use if you want.

Code:

use CGI;

$query = new CGI;
print $query->header;
print $query->start_html('Upload file');

$form = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
@args = split('=', $form);
$args[1] =~ s/%3A/:/g;
$args[1] =~ s/%5C/\\/g;
@pieces = split('\\\\', $args[1]);
$length = @pieces;
$localpath = "";
for ($i=0; $i<=$length-2; $i++) {
$localpath .= "$pieces[$i]\\";
}
$localname = $pieces[$length-1];
print "Uploading $localpath$localname";
$serverfile = $ENV{'DOCUMENT_ROOT'} . "/assgn3/cont/$localname";

open(FILEIN, "<$localpath$localname");
open(FILEOUT, ">$serverfile");
while ($line = (less than sign)FILEIN(greater than sign)) {
print FILEOUT $line;
}
close FILEIN;
close FILEOUT;

print "Upload successful, redirecting to main.pl";
print "(less than sign)meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='4; url=main.pl'(greater than sign)";
print "(less than sign)/body(greater than sign)(less than sign)/html(greater than sign)";