Random gibberish

As I use thunderbird as my mail (and with lightening my calendar) on all my various machines, I use an IMAP server for storing the emails and google calendar to share calendars.
talk about headaches. How difficult can it be to share my calendars to ensure I can see what is supposed to be happening and when. It took a lot of messing about but I’ve finally managed it.
Thunderbird syncs with google – eventually (took 2 hours to get it to work and I still don’t know what fixed it).
N97 syncs with google and thus in turn with thunderbird.
Sorted – now at long last I’ve got consistent calendars across all my various platforms.
Now if only the junior cricket teams would release their fixtures then I could get my summer organised a bit.

Loaded xbmc onto the laptop this afternoon. Have to say I’m impressed. It had no problem playing any of my stuff.
Set the laptop to output through the HDMI port and whey hey displayed very nicely on the 42″ plasma in the lounge. With the addition of the Dell remote I’ve got a nice remote station for watching the vids .
I think I may show this off to swmbo and suggest on of the new ion based mini machines. Will have to workout a remote control for it though. If I could put in a password and drop back to the full desktop it could be useful.

I’ve finally bought a draft-n router (dlink 615).
After debating for ages on whether to update my wireless network, I came across the router on Fleabay. Cost was all of a tenner so I thought Why not, let’s see what this ‘n’ lark is like.
If I was going to change over completely then I’d be getting dual mode access points. SWMBO’s work machine needs b/g, the WII needs b/g, so the best idea would be to dedicate 5GHz to ‘n’.
As I’m only experimenting the ‘n’ is also on 2.4GHz – nothing to do with the price, honest .
Recently I changed my laptop over to Ubuntu – why is another story. It’s been a big learning curve for me – I’m not really used to gui based configs. There are some bits I like and yet more that I don’t – being a gentoo type person at heart having everything gui’ised don’t really cut it. However, one of the advantages of Linux is that I can always drop back to the command line should I need to.
So, how’s the ‘n’ working. Well, I can see it and log onto the network via it.
The throughput is certainly better than when I was connected at ‘g’ but and this is a big but, I’m not convinced that I’m connecting at ‘n’. My ‘n’ router is only connected to the network via a powerline adapter so it only has about 3MB of bandwidth available to it – which it can fill at 54Mb/s without any great problem.
So what’s the big deal – take a look at this output of iwconfig:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:”dlink”
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm

That’s at odds with the gui which is reporting 48Mb/s.
iwlist wlan0 bitrate:
wlan0 unknown bit-rate information.
Current Bit Rate:1 Mb/s
hmmm – that’s a tad suspicious me thinks.
So what does iwlist think of the ‘dlink’:
ESSID:”dlink”
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
18 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
hang on a second there. Shouldn’t there be something above 54 ?? the dlink is actually turned to ‘n’ only so why the limit ?
A quick search online and we find this problem is something to do with the way the iwlagn driver has been configured for ubuntu.
With Gentoo I never had this problem – adding bits into the kernel was really pretty straight forward, you just rebuilt the thing.
I suppose I’ll go back to running my own vanilla kernel patched with the various drivers that I’ll need. For a desktop/laptop this becomes a right pita to manage though.
There is something called backports for Ubuntu which I’m going to try out – whether anyone will have compiled in the right bit of the driver I’ve no idea.
If this actually works then the access point will move onto the GE vlan rather than the low bandwidth powerline vlan.
Then it’ll just be a case of pursuading swmbo that I need to upgrade things yet again .
Speaking of upgrades, I suppose it’s time I bought another GE switch – but decent ones are still a tad pricey.

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