Recently in Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter Category

I did an update today on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop that our 6-year-old uses mostly for the educational games GCompris, Childsplay and the excellent TuxPaint.

The Gateway (aka The $0 Laptop) isn't normally connected to the Internet, although that could very well change as our daughter gets old.

So it goes a long time between updates. When I do sit down to update it, I plug the Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter into the laptop's sole working USB port. It originally had two but the plastic tab inside the jack broke off quite some time ago. Luckily the touchpad still works on this 2000-era laptop, since I have to unplug the mouse in order to do the update over WiFi. (I'll eventually spring for the $5 to get a USB hub for this thing).

The update went without incident. It had been over two months since the last update on this installation of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, yet there were surprisingly few packages that needed replacing: Firefox and its ancillary packages, the kernel and tzdata.

I do have the Opera Web browser on this computer, even though I don't really need it to be on here, but in order to update it from the Opera repository, I had to reimport the GPG key. I followed my own recipe ignore the Debian Etch problems and go right to the Opera portion of the entry) and then updated Opera from 9.64 to 10.01.

At some point in the recent past, the "h" key popped off the keyboard, and after replacing it, the "h" had to be pressed really, really hard in order to make the letter appear.

I looked into a replacement keyboard, but I had an idea on how to fix the "h.":

I popped the key off again, placed a very small piece of paper, folded over once, between the "h" key cover and the key membrane itself, then snapped the "h" back into place.

That did it; we can safely type "h" again.

As laptops go, this Gateway is no "best of breed," but it does have a very nice keyboard (better than my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and unlike the Toshiba, the Gateway still has a working touchpad.

Unfortunately the Cardbus slot's pins are horribly bent — there was a screw lodged in there, and when I tried to plug a PCMCIA card in there for the first time, that was enough to bend the pins. I tried straightening them, but it didn't work. I suppose I could find a replacement Cardbus assembly, but since the laptop does work with USB WiFi (and very well; better than the Toshiba did with this same adapter and OS), this laptop that cost me nothing a few years ago is still quite serviceable.

I did have to buy a new hard drive (I pulled the old one and gave it to the laptop's original owner). I also had to do a quick/dirty power plug replacement (the reason the laptop was dead and given to me; the repair quote was $800; a new motherboard just to replace a very poorly designed power plug). I did the repair guerrilla style for $3.

At one point the Gateway had 1 GB of RAM (I did buy the modules used), but since the Toshibas use the same PC133 SODIMM modules, I've moved them around a bit, and now the Gateway is running with 512 MB. That's a serviceable amount of RAM. More is always better, but 512 MB gets it done.

Since I'm having no stability or networking issues with the Gateway, I will not be upgrading it through 8.10 to 9.04 and then 9.10. When the next Ubuntu LTS comes out in 2010, I'll consider doing that upgrade, but I'll be worried as I always am about breakage on this now-9-year-old platform.

I resisted upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — the project's "stable," long-term-support release — because everything worked pretty well, my hardware was fairly well-recognized, there were no showstopping bugs ... and that's a good thing.

After running the LTS for a year (I still have it on another laptop), I decided to undergo the pain of an in-place upgrade through 8.10 and to 9.04. My intention was to be ready for a semi-immediate upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 when it is released later this month.

But now that I'm running 9.10 and everything is working even better than with 8.04, I'm facing the same dilemma — and again, better a dilemma of this sort than the other.

Why is 9.04 so good on my particular hardware? I'm running a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB PC133 RAM, 20 GB hard drive) and a Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter.

Here's a rundown of Ubuntu 9.04 compared to 8.04 on my rig:

Better in 9.04

Boots faster
NetworkManager (after config-file tweak) MUCH MUCH better
Sound better (PulseAudio has improved)
Flash better (v. 10 way better than v. 9)
CNet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter hasn't killed laptop once (major improvement)

The same in 9.04
Toshiba laptop suspends but won't resume
Intel video (I thought it would be worse, but at this point in the release cycle, it's OK)

Worse in 9.04
New method of notifying users of updates via minimized window instead of update icon is puzzling; not a deal-breaker, just a head-scratcher

I'm a big proponent of the long-term-release concept in operating systems because I think both the enterprise and the home user doesn't want things breaking and should have the option of sticking with a particular distribution longer than 6 or 12 months.

And I stuck with the current long-term release of Ubuntu — 8.04 — for well over a year because it worked fairly well with the particular hardware I'm using.

But often a new release can clear up problems and be more stable than the perceived "stable" release.

That seems to be the case with my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop and Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter.

While it worked great in OpenBSD 4.4 and worked OK in various Linux distributions with newish kernels, I was having intermittent crashes in Ubuntu while using the adapter. I'd be using the laptop with the CWD-854 for a couple of hours and, without warning, the screen would freeze and nothing short of a hard restart would bring it back.

Well, I finally decided to upgrade to 9.04 (on the cusp of 9.10's release, if you hadn't noticed). I'll have a review in the near future. (Bet everyone can't wait for my 9.04 review when 9.10 is almost here, right?)

The upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and then 9.04 took about six hours, accounting for both download and install time.

The changes to NetworkManager between 8.04 and 8.10 (the app looks and works much unlike it's predecessor) threw me for awhile, and I've finally got a fair handle on how to manage both wired and wireless networking.

One bonus I've been enjoying for the past few days is greater stability when using the Cnet CWD-854 WiFi adapter. It runs great, has a strong connection to my router, and I haven't had a crash of any kind since I made the upgrade to 9.04.

So on my particular rig, Ubuntu 9.04 is looking pretty darn stable next to 8.04, which was no slouch in the stability department (after solving problems along the way with Pidgin and Flash).

What does this mean? As usual, I'll try to wait a while before upgrading to 9.10 because I'm enjoying use of such a good, working system, and I'd rather avoid the rush (and the overworked mirrors). And we're only six months away from the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04 ...