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wifiroamd, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, and Fedora

One of the things that has annoyed me about Fedora has been the decision to switch over to using NetworkManager to manage all network connections.

Now, on the service this has a lot of advantages. A lot of work has gone into it, and it just works for a vast majority of the installations out there. They have made it so the move from wired to wireless and back can be done without the user doing anything. They have also seamlessly tied in Dial-Up Networking if you still need a modem or use a wireless modem. They even have two-click access to your VPN which is pretty cool.

All these are things which are very good for Linux users. The biggest drawback to all this? The need for a user-space program to manage the non-hardwired connections. Which means that in order to be able to have any network running besides the good old twisted-pair copper, you have to have a little applet running as you, and it has to have a systray somewhere to display. Which means you have to be a) logged into the system and b) you have to be running a window manager which supports having a system tray. Now, Fedora gives you lots of choices for the second part now days. You have Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE (was at lxde.sf.net). All are perfectly usable window managers. But, they still require you to be logged in to X. And, I do not use any of them.

So, what is a cli-loving Fedora user to do? Well, there is this great program called wifiroamd. It will handle the same basic tasks that NetworkManager handles. It will automatically configure your wifi interface and connect to the wifi networks or the locate hardwired NIC if it cannot. You can configure it to run scripts per connection, so for example, you can change your firewall rules for different networks (shields down at home or the office, but up full at the coffee house), or you could bring up your VPN connection when you start using a given wireless network. One tip I picked up from the author was that if you have multiple AP’s in range, an you want to select once AP over the other, is under the /etc/wifiroamd/connections directory, simply link the AP info you do not want to the one you want:

ln essid:my_home_ap essid:bad_ap

where essid:my_home_ap is your AP with the keys and other information you want, and essid:bad_ap is the one you do not want to connect to. My neighbors have some very powerful AP’s which have a habit of showing up high than mine, but I have no problem with them now.

I have been using this set up under Fedora since FC6 days, but when I upgraded to F10, this stopped working. wifiroamd would try to scan for an AP, and not find anything. The change, it turns out, is that when I switched from using the iw3945 driver to the native iwl3945, wifiroamd could no longer see the wireless NIC due to the wpa_supplicant process, but NetworkManager could. Simply stopping and disabling wp_supplicant and NetworkManager, and wifiroamd started working again! I am a happy camper again.

C*MUS - A music manager for the terminal

C*mus is an advanced music juke-box for *inx and Window operating systems. It can handle the modern audio file formats: FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, MP3 , Wav, AAC , MP4, .mod, .s3m, .mpc, mpp, .mp+, .wma, and .wv . It also can deal with many different types of audio output systems: ALSA, libao, ARTS, OSS, Sun, and WaveOut on Windows. The typical features of an electronic juke-box are supported like play lists and random/shuffle play, in addition to easily switching between playing from the library, an artist, or a single album with a simple keystroke.

C*Mus is pretty painless to install from source. The website lists the build dependencies with links.

En-queuing

One of the features I really enjoy and use is the en-queue function. I tend to use this two ways. The first is when I am listening to a song, and want to listen to similar songs, I go find them in my library, and I queue them up with a simple keystroke. A dynamic play-list, if you will. Then, I can simply create a more permanent playlist from this temporary list.

The second way is using the helper program cmus-remote to be able to queue up tracks from a different terminal, or from a script. My podcatcher program (bashpodder) will queue up the podcasts it just downloaded for me, so I can listen to them first thing in the morning.
Keystroke and CLI

CMus is developed to be driven via keystrokes. The default mapping is set up to be comfortable for those use are familiar with VI but, it is very easy to remap the keys to make it more comfortable. CMus will automatically save the current settings on a clean exit. The default mappings for selecting and updating views, moving through songs forward and backwards in small and large increments, adding to play list and queue lists.

Filters

One of the very powerful features is simple filters. You can set a filter for your 80’s Metal Bands or your Classical music. Many of the common tags can be used for filter on. Things like filename, artist, album, title, genre, discnumber, tracknumber, date (year), duration (seconds), and tag.

Google’s Calendar on the Command Line!

You love your comfortable command line, but all the cool kids are playing in the Web 2.0 web space, and you want to stay true to your roots?  Want a Web 2.0 calendar, but still love (or need) command line access?

I just found the answer: gcalcli. This little tool will let you list your appointments, get an list your events, get an agenda, print ascii rendering of your calendar for the week or month.  You can even add events to the calendar.

I like the fact that I can easly get at my gcalendar from anywhere (even my cell phone), and now I can do it from my shell.

The only downsides so far?  The code has not been updated since October of 2007, and the speed can be a little slow sometimes. I am going to play with it for a while to see if I like it enough to replace remind.