Wi-Fi radar system for your desktop

Some time ago, a friend of mine managed to convince a buddy of his that the Sonar screensaver from xscreensaver was in fact tracking all other computers in the neighbourhood – which happened to be laptops, of course. Great fun – wish I’d been there to witness it 🙂

Anyway, I just came across a recently released gizmo from Xirrus that will in fact do almost that, pinging all wireless networks in the area and displaying their locations relative to your computer.

The Xirrus Wi-Fi monitor - the radar display is in the upper left corner

The gizmo, which has been available as a gadget or widget for Windows
XP and Vista for some time, has just been released for Linux as a
“desklet” for the gDesklet framework.

As I use Kubuntu, and my friend uses openSUSE, I’ll just point out that gDesklets are already available from the default Ubuntu repositories and merely need to be installed using the Synaptic package manager or the like.

For openSUSE, you need to first enable the Build Service GNOME:STABLE repository (which you can find with along other community repositories in the Installation Source module of YaST), then you’ll be ready.

Once that is done, visit the link below and get the desklet package. Then launch gDesklets and select “Install package” from the File menu – then you can put the desklet onto your desktop.

Advanced IT Wi-Fi Networking Tools – Xirrus Wireless LAN

YaUP (Yet Another Ubuntu Post)

Recently, I came across the following blog post in an rss-feed.

Computing Tech: Why Choose Ubuntu?

While I agree that Ubuntu is an excellent choice for anyone new to Linux (or indeed, for more experienced people as well – I for one still use it), I disagree with some of the ‘selling’ points of the post. Let’s go over them one by one:

Dependable and robust
I know these terms come across as mere hype, but after you smack Ubuntu around a bit, you come to understand what they mean. Knock things down and around, and they bounce right back—this is very important for beginners who often have a knack for screwing things up. Nothing turns a new user off more than a twitchy system that has to be velvet gloved all the time.

This is highly dependent on the hardware environment Ubuntu is subjected to. Being always ready to help out those of my friends who are curious to try Linux, I have experienced brand new installations of Ubuntu that behaved as erratically and unstable as Windows-systems of the past. Granted, the hardware setups might have been a bit esoteric, but still… The remedy in each and every case has been to go with openSUSE instead, which in my experience always provides stability where Ubuntu has failed. Conversely, you could also easily find examples of the exact opposite being true. In the end, it’s all down to the hardware.

Desktop user–oriented
A lot of Linux distributions, although quite capable in the desktop arena, cater more to geeks and developers, taking up valuable disk space with a lot of junk you’ll probably never use. Ubuntu’s purpose is to grab desktop market share from the Redmond folks, so the needs of the common end user are always in mind. The result is that Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop environment is a very comfy place for the average desktop user to be.

I have two problems with this assertion – first off, in my experience, not even the ‘big’ DVD-based distributions, such as openSUSE, Fedora and Mandriva will install developer tools by default – nor do the most popular live-CD distributions do this. Anyway, even if you happened to suffer from developer or “geek” tools being installed by default, removing said tools, I suspect, is a rather trivial and easily accomplished task.

Secondly, I find the assertion that “Ubuntu’s purpose is to grab desktop market share from the Redmond folks” to be highly questionable. If you want a system designed for the purpose of grabbing market shares, you might as well use Windows instead. Following the suggested line of thought, Windows is then by default a better product, since it has achieved near-complete dominance on the desktop market.The purpose of any Linux distribution is fundamentally about the sharing of information (knowledge and software), I would argue, as reflected in the open source model. And Ubuntu’s official philosophy clearly reflects this.