On 4/3/2013 2:19 AM, Chris Knadle wrote:
On Tuesday, April 02, 2013 23:41:36, Gary A Mort wrote:
[...]
Secondly, I had no end of heck dealing with UEFI. I could install Linux
Mint[a Ubuntu derivative] just fine but when it came time to reboot, it
kept going to windows. In the end, I disabled UEFI since I was doing a
separate hard drive anyway and just switch it back on when I go to windows.
In the short run disabling UEFI is fine. However I recommend watching the
following talk regardless, because there's a tool available to manipulate the
UEFI keys so that you "own" your own system. By default the root key is one
owned by Microsoft, and you can replace it with your own, as well as other
things.
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/Making_UEFI_Secure_boot_work_for_you.mp4
I have a low end, slow laptop and Linux Mint was nice and zippy, did
everything at the speed I wanted.....except the silly Realtek wireless
card would not work properly. It constantly dropped my connection,
would not connect, would not connect to open wifi networks, etc.
It got to the point that I finally gave up and am unhappily using
Windows 8 and counting the days until I can upgrade to a new
computer....this time I will double check the network card compatibility
before getting it and then I will finally be back on Mint and happy.
Out of curiosity was this in combination with using ndiswrapper?
Wireless on Linux is sometimes still in a troubled state because the kernel
developers can't get specs on the devices from the manufacturer, and the
firmware is sometimes buggy. Some kernel versions have better support for
specific devices than others.
And yeah, unfortunately when buying hardware desitined for Linux, there's a
lot of "let the buyer beware" to take account for. :-/ So I agree that it
takes research beforehand.
I did try the ndiswrapper, but that was the last thing I tried. First I
tried the drivers in the apt repositories, then I tried compiling and
installing realtek's drivers manually[with presumably a binary blob
somewhere in their process] and then ndiswrapper.
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=48&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#RTL8188CE
The really frustrating thing is that in addition to the built-in card[a
RTL8192CE] I also have a usb version which I had used when having
trouble with my previous laptop.
Most troubleshooting steps include enabling software encryption - which
had worked for me before. On the new laptop it made things worse and I
found I had to disable it instead to get slightly better performance.
My guess is that there is a binary blob being used when on-card
encryption is used - and that the problem lies with it. Enabling
software encoding moves things off the card and onto the CPU, bypassing
the problem. Since my new system is rather low end, I assume the CPU
just can't keep up with wifi.
*shrug*....it works for windows and runs PHPStorm and Smartgit, so I can
use it for projects and get a better system a few months down the line.
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