Network light blinking

For some reason, some person decided that it's very nice to see your network light of your Wifi blinking. Every laptop user should know that this can be very irritating because usually this light is in front of you.

There are ways to solve this problem, I know one of the solutions and I will explain it here.

First of all you need a network manager which is able to run a script after the connection has been made. Because I use Wicd Network manager which you can download from this location: http://wicd.sourceforge.net (follow the installation instructions from there website)

Now we have to create script which can be run by Wicd. Open a Terminal and type the following: > sudo gedit /etc/network/if-up.d/noblink

After you have typed your password, a file editor will open. Paste the following lines in the file and save and close it:

#!/bin/sh
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:RX/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:TX/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:radio/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:assoc/trigger

Now we are almost finished, the only thing we have to do, is telling Wicd that it should run this file after the connection has been made. Open Wicd, and go to the Wireless network connection which you want to use. Click on the white arrow which will collapse the advanced settings of the Wifi connection. Here you can click scripts, and after you have entered your admin password you wil be able to tell which script has to been run and when. Have a look at the screenshot and do the same.

To test if this works, disable your Wifi and enable it. Now try to make the connection to your Wifi network and if everything works fine, you will see that the blinking has been stopped. The only problem with this setup is, that you have to specify for every Wifi connection that this script should be used.

Easy to use bittorrent client

I'm using bittorrent for many years now, and I have used many different clients as well. But as you probably know, you will always stick to one client after a while. There can be many reasons to do so, and for me, performance and easy to use interface was the main reason. So on Windows I used Bittcomet for a while, but when I changed to Linux, there was no Bitcomet available anymore.

But, as we all know, in the open-source community there is always a decent replacement for almost everything. So I stumbled across Deluge bittorrent client. It has every thing you need, easy installation and the software is well maintained. There are many options to choose from, and even if you don't really know how bittorrent works, the default settings should be enough for almost everyone.

Just have a look at the following screenshot, you can download the software from http://deluge-torrent.org/downloads.php and select the appropriate Ubuntu package.

Reduce power consumption on Linux

If you have a desktop, power consumption shouldn't be a real issue if you're not a environmental activist. For Laptop users, power consumption is always an issue and in Ubuntu, there are several ways to reduce this.

The easiest way is to change the power options from the menu, go to the Ubuntu menu, then to Preferences and Power Options. Here you can do some common changes which you also find in Windows for example.

But there is a difference between laptops and desktops, therefore you can change a parameter in a configuration file where you can tell Ubuntu that you're working on a laptop. You have to do the following:

Open a terminal and type: sudo gedit /etc/default/acpi-support

Now you will see an editor, look for ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false and change this to ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true

Reboot your laptop to make sure that the configuration has been loaded properly.

Random links

When surfing on the web, I find some useful links once in a while. I will put them in this post with a description, if you think you have some useful links as well, just drop me a message.

http://www.linuxalt.com - Alternative software for Linux

Installing Office 2007 on Ubuntu Linux

In the previous post I explained how to install the latest version of Wine. The minimum requirement is Wine version 1.1.13 and it's still a development version. But it's working fine so there are no arguments to not to install this. Actually, you need the latest version to fix the problem with numbering and bullets.

Make sure you have done the minimum preparations. We start with starting up "Configure Wine" and you will see the following. Make sure that your Wine settings are the same.

You can easily use "Add application" and just type in the name you want to add. It's not necessary to search for the EXE file. Make sure that the Windows version is Windows XP. That's all!

For the people with a dual boot setup like me, you can change the default "My Documents" location in the "Desktop Integration" tab to your "documents directory" on the Windows partition.

Now we are going to install the software. Because it's your first time MS Office installation on your computer, you don't have to delete old MS data to make the installer work. Ubuntu tries to use an "the Archive Manager" to open EXE files. We don't want this, so we are going to change this first. The easiest way to do this, is going to the properties of an EXE file (right mouse click -> Properties) and change the following so it will look like this:

After you have changed these settings, you can just double click the setup.exe file and install Office like you always have done with Windows!

Keep in mind that Wine is still in development, even after version 1.0. This means that not ever Office program is working. Word and Excel works, but expect to experience problem with the other Office programs like Outlook. When there is a fix, I will put the instructions in this blog. Read further for instructions how to run PowerPoint.

For PowerPoint, you have to change a dll setting, not to difficult. First you add powerpnt.exe in the "Application" tab like you did with the setup.exe. Make sure that powerpnt.exe is highlighted. Now we go to the "Libraries" tab and make sure you have the same setting for the riched20.dll as shown on the screenshot:

After this, you can normally startup PowerPoint.