Wisedigs

If you want to build your own custom firmware for the Belkin N1 router this guide will explain how to do it for the F5D8232-4 v2. The others should be similar. I will explain this using the Debian distro. The reason for this is the cross compiling tools used by belkin are Debian only executables. You can create your own cross-compiling tools for Cygwin, Ubuntu, Suse, etc if you prefer them over Debian (or you happen to have a box setup) and then use this guide to assist you through the rest of the process.

Cygwin is not recommended as it is very slow and you will spend many minutes twiddling your thumb while it compiles.
Read the rest of this entry »

Finally had a chance to install linux (Ubuntu 9.10) on a personal computer. After 15 years of the Windows GUI (Graphical User Interface).. I can say I am not as dissappointed as I thought I would be. That means it left a not unpleasant taste, which is a good thing.

The GUI is much snappier, and you don’t waste time waiting for silly effects plaguing today’s top Operating Systems (OSes). When you run, it runs. When you stop it stops. I love that! Package management is sweet, I don’t need to spend time googling my software when most of it can be had from the OS. Nobody beats linux in customizability, something everyone should know by now. I can even say they went over the top with the features, checkboxes, and textbox fields. This needs to improve for linux to recieve widespread support from the uneducated portion of users.

When you have been using Windows exclusively (mostly) for the majority of your IT life, you “feel” the OS and it becomes very predictable. With linux, I find this predictability instinct to be useless because I just can’t feel it. I don’t know what to expect or when to expect it. I don’t know where things will appear and what the most suitable response is. This is not a bad thing, it is just different.

The one thing I can feel is the hardware has the opportunity to breath. With windows you feel like your laptop is a stressed out over-the-hill single mom. With Ubuntu it’s like an athlete ready to run the telethon. Your harddrive isn’t forever reading/writing, your memory isn’t consumed by things you don’t understand, and your CPU fan isn’t running at max speed because your CPU patiently awaits the next gentle request.

Am I ready to ditch Windows? Not by a long shot. You have nice and you have usability and convenience. Linux is “nice”, but hugely impractical for someone that has many dependencies on silly programs. It’s not a great surprise that many corporations choose linux as their primary server OS. It is also not a great surprise that windows is the #1 preferred end-user platform in the world.

Thank you Linux for the alternate experience.