Thinkpad Stories 3: “Now for some colours…”

Ubuntu’s finished installing. It all looks nice.

I picked a nice wallpaper, set my workspaces to 8, and installed gnome-art (sudo apt-get install gnome-art). Picked some nice decorations (I like the Human theme but not that much) and sat back for a few seconds to admire my new desktop.

Then: I installed Automatix. Automatix had a reputation of being intrusive and all, but is very well maintained these days and I hadn’t had the slightest problem. (Easyubuntu gave an error, and less options to install. Don’t want to flame though: it’s good too and my previous favorite.)

This took a while.

There were to other things I wanted to solve before being completely satisfied.

The first was WPA support since my home network uses that.

I found a lot of information on the forums, configure this and write that, but here is the most easy way to do it:

  • Make sure wpa-supplier and gnome-network-tools are installed
  • sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces. Uncomment everything except local loopback entries
  • Note: you can use commands like

    wpa_supplicant -w -i eth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D wext

    and write a configuration in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. But you do not have to

  • sudo gedit /etc/default/wpasupplicant and just enter this:

    ENABLED=0

  • Reboot (or re-init).

  • I now see an eth0 icon in my Gnome taskbar. I also see an icon were I can choose from available wireless connections. I pick mine, enter my WPA password and set type to TKIP. I also have to enter a keyring password for gnome.

Waiting… authenticating… assigning address… done! I disconnect my network cable.

See next post for my second problem.