It turns out that my wireless problem is in my router not my computer. My 2wire router crashes when I try to connect to it using the iwl3945 driver. Ubuntu Gutsy used the ipw3945 driver (now deprecated). That driver worked. Otherwise, Hardy is cool.

The wireless card continues to not work but I am installing anyway (nothing to loose). I am hoping that the fix on launchpad will work.

Edit: The battery monitor applet does work in GNOME.

I just tried out Xubuntu hardy beta on with full disk encryption.

Verdict: Broken.

1. Xubuntu would not properly display my battery percentage (the panel applet would display 28%, 100%, or 0%).

2. The wireless worked fine and then suddenly stopped working (I had not updated or otherwise messed with my system). When I conncted to a wireless network said network would go down (tested with 2wire only).

I am now trying ubuntu 8.04 beta x86_64 (the 64 bit version) on my dual core, 64bit Intel laptop. I will post the results.

After a lot of fruitless searching I finally figured out the command to turn the scroll lock led on and off in X. I first tried setleds +scroll and setleds -scroll but that only works in a Virtual Terminal. I then tried xset led on and xset led off. That one messes up the num pad. I finally came up with the following:

On:

xset led 3

Off:

xset -led 3

I use mail-notification and set the scroll lock led to go on when I have new mail and set it to go off when I have read the mail.

After a lot of tweaking, my desktop is beginning to look how I would like it to look.

This is my friend Josh's blog. Random but interesting.

I just signed up with 1and1.com and found that they do not offer marginally advanced DNS settings and allow only five subdomains. To work around these limitations I signed up with Xname.org. They allow unfettered customization of the DNS record and are free. I very much recommend them (and thank them).

Today I spent 10 hrs fixing my hostname.

I had just bought the domain stebalien.com and was fiddling around with my network settings with network-admin and found the domain box. I typed in my new domain to see what the setting did. Nothing happened for a while so I erased the setting and changed the hosts file back to its origional state (without the domain name). Later, while I was using firefox, my session crashed. I logged back in and received this error:

(process:6725): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

(process:6729): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

I was consequently logged out. This error had nothing to do with the hostname so I assumed that one of my files had been corrupted. After reinstalling half of my system (sudo aptitude reinstall packages) and looking through all of my configuration files I finally logged in using startx. I was immediately logged back out with a hostname internal error. I spent another hour going over my host configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, ...) and all of my DNS configuration files. I finally logged back in using the Failsafe Terminal, typed in sudo network-admin and re-added my domain name, logged back out and in, and my session did not crash. I then proceeded to launch firefox. The page did not load. I could ping, tracerout, and use elinks (a text based web browser for the console) but I Firefox would not load any website. I tinkered with my network-admin settings for 15 minuets before I finally realized that I had a backup of my network-admin settings. I restored my settings and proceeded to write this blog post. I am still clueless as to what my problem was but am happy that it was at least fixed.