Setup Edimax USB wireless adaptor in Ubuntu

Linux and Ubuntu generally impresses me with the number of devices you can plug in and it just works.  Installing the Edimax EW-7811UN was not one of those times.  To be fair, I also had the same issue with an older model Linksys WUSB54GSC, but the form factor of the new Edimax was just too good to pass up (it bills itself as the worlds smallest wireless adaptor).    No matter how hard I tried to keep the Linksys adaptor out of harms way, my kids have generally tried to find way to try to break it off in the USB slot.  They take this mission very seriously although the Linksys adaptor has survived against all odds.

The nice part about the Edimax network adaptor is it does come with a set of drivers that compiles under linux but you have to download it from their web site.  Actually it is based on the Realtek RTL8192C chipset so do not be surprised when you extract the driver package.  Now on to the fun stuff.

Go into the directory where you extracted the drivers and build the modules:

make clean
make

That should  go ahead and build your modules.  Next we just need to use insmod to install the module to make sure everything is working:

sudo insmod 8192cu.ko

If all went well, you should soon be able to see your wireless network and connect normally.  If you are a glutton for punishment you can do this every time you start up your system to get net access going.  Personally, I prefer it just to work every time I turn on the system and it just requires a few more steps:

sudo cp 8192cu.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
sudo insmod 8192cu.ko
sudo depmod -a

This will copy the newly compiled module into the kernel drivers directory and the depmod -a should add it to the module dependencies.   I am thinking this will probably have to be done on every kernel upgrade until the hardware is automatically detected so I am keeping my driver’s source around in case I need to recompile and reinstall the module.

Now to see what the kids try to break next….

Moved to linux (again)

I know I have made several of these posts in the past where I say I ditched my Windows roots and moved everything to linux.  This time, I believe, will be different.

AnyEdit, a great plugin for Eclipse based IDE’s

Anyone who has ever done any amount of work with me knows that I am a little bit of a “Code Nazi.”  I am not a fan of tab-indented coding because on a busy page I do not want to keep scrolling into the middle of next week just to get to the end of a line.  I prefer indenting each new level of code with a space because it is just as easy to interpret and nesting several layers deep does start almost off the page.

As I mentioned before I have switched to Aptana for development recently and that is one of the best changes I have made in a long time.  Aptana has quite a few settings in the preferences for handling tabs in the editor.  Unfortunately, changing these settings seem to only affect how the editor displays the code.  If you save a file and open it in another editor, the tabs will display as tabs again and again the nesting will be off the page.

Well today I could not take it any more and I set out looking for a solution to the problem.  Then I came across a nice little plugin called AnyEdit.  AnyEdit will allow you to convert tabs to spaces as well as clean up any trialing whitespace after tags.  Definitely worth checking out if do not like the nested tabs either.