Archive for July, 2008

Ubuntu Update Manager Log

Published by eltonone on July 18, 2008 under Tutorials

The location of the log file which shows you what you have updated with the Update Manager in Ubuntu is:
/var/log/apt/term.log

It was useful for me, it might be for you.

Solving Wireless Troubles With A Macbook Pro & Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Published by eltonone on July 18, 2008 under Tutorials

When I was running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibon) the wireless card on my Macbook Pro was not recognised so I installed Madwifi to get it working.  When I upgraded to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) everything still worked fine (whether this was because Madwifi was still in use or because 8.04 has the right drivers for the wireless card I am unsure) but with the update which I installed on 11/07/2008 once I had restarted my computer my wireless card was no longer accessible.  Luckily I found this great tutorial from http://ubuntu-tutorials.com a while ago which I mentioned while talking about setting up 7.10 on a Macbook Pro and this solved the problem and got my wireless card working again.  The previous settings were saved which makes me think Madwifi has been fine all along until the 11/07/2008 Ubuntu update.  Looking in the Update Manager log file at /var/log/apt/term.log for there were a fair few updates and replacement but I don’t know what most of them are so I can’t specifically say what happened - anyone who might know and wants the look at the log file get in touch.

  1. sudo aptitude install build-essential
  2. wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-trunk-current.tar.gz
  3. tar -zxf madwifi-trunk-current.tar.gz
  4. cd ‘to the folder madwifi was unzipped to’
  5. make
  6. sudo make install
  7. sudo modprobe ath_pci
  8. sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Run all that through terminal and you’re sorted.
Thanks to Christer Edwards of http://ubuntu-tutorials.com and Madwifi for this.

Why Does BASH Differ Across Different Platforms?

Published by eltonone on July 10, 2008 under Scripts

Using the BASH shell in OS X I wanted to examine the EXIF data of my JPG files for a script I am writing. Unfortunately, the exif command in BASH does not work, despite there being a man page for it. I’m solving this problem by using ExifTool by Phil Harvey, but it leaves me asking the question “Why does the BASH exif command work with Linux but not with OS X?” I had a similar problem using the uniq command that works fine with Linux but only partially with OS X:
uniq -w 32
That is because in OS X there is no -w flag. Most of the scripts and examples I find to learn from are written in BASH with Linux and I’m having a really hard time understanding why BASH is not the same with OS X. It makes no sense.

Anyone?

UPDATE 10/07/08

In fact, you don’t get exif on Linux so what am I talking about (and there isn’t even a man page for it like on OS X). Use exiv2 or exiftool. Still confusing why it’s there in OS X though..

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