WPA Conclusion

After fooling around with this piece of crap WPA support on my usb wifi connector.  I decide it wasn't worth the hassle and set WEP right back up.  I decided to just setup a more secure 128-bit pass key and be done with it.  My connection was still locked at 54 Mbps anyway, so... whatever.

Update: WPA, Ubuntu, and my Linksys WUSB54GC

I've been analyzing the logs from syslog and kern.log and I can see no real errors happening during the instance of the failure.  I can further confirm that reconnecting will not fix the connection stability.  Also, I can clearly see that rekeying does not bring down the internet connection.

What seems to stabilize the connection is if I re-apply my router settings on WiFi.  Then, it will run without issues for a while and then run into the connection drops.  It doesn't totally disconnect from my access point.  It just seems to lose packets.  But since there's no errors in the logs, it is unclear why this error happens at all.  I did read some person saying that when the device would scan for 802.11 n access points, the connection would momentarily fail.  I doubt that is the case, but I've reconfigured my router to be 802.11 b and 802.11 g for the outside chance that my router causes weird problems with 802.11 n.

WPA and the Ralink RT73 USB driver

After many years of using WEP security with MAC address filters so I could accommodate my old DS and my (dead) Zaurus to use online connectivity, I decided to make the switch to WPA-Personal with the same MAC address filters.  This is when I discovered that the Ralink RT73 USB drivers has an issue when the router does the WPA group rekey.  It seems that as soon as the router switches the secret keys, the device has trouble coping with the connection.  The connection becomes unstable and it seems that I have to disconnect and reconnect to my access point to get a stable connection.  I am still digging information on what to do about this and I want to avoid ndiswrapper as much as possible.

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 13b1:0020 Linksys WUSB54GC v1 802.11g Adapter [Ralink RT73]

and here's the entry in my /var/log/syslog

wpa_supplicant[1060]: wlan0: WPA: Group rekeying completed [mac address] [GTK=TKIP]

Eken W70 Tablet Boot Issues

Last night, the Eken tablet would get stuck in the ICS boot splash and refused to go to the actual tablet login screen.  It made me look to see how to get this thing into system recovery mode.  A little bit of Google helped, but documentation on this piece of machinery is hard to come by.  I did find it though so, here's how.

1. Make sure the tablet is off.
2. Hold down volume + button and the volume - button and then press the power button (to boot up the tablet).
3. Keep the volume buttons held down until you see the red text appear on the screen asking for confirmation.
4. Release the volume buttons and hit the power button to confirm.
5. The Android bot should appear with a revolving object.
6. The machine will automatically restart and boot to the restored settings.
7. All your apps are gone so you'll have to reconfigure everything.

Update on Street Racing Syndicate

My last test on Wine with Street Racing Syndicate was to disable winegstreamer.dll using winecfg.  It cleared out some of the clutter of the errors and I got this one:

MPEG-1 system streams not yet supported

Simple enough, I downloaded quartz via winetricks to see if it would clear out the issue.  As it turns out it didn't.  The game still crashed.  I suppose it's back to Windows as far as this game is concerned.

Wine and Gstreamer woes?

I stumbled upon this bug report on winegstreamer noting that it's broken on 64-bit distros.  I wonder if this is related to my issues with Street Racing Syndicate.   Hmm...

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ubuntu, MultiArch, and Wine

I've been attempting to install Street Racing Syndicate using Wine which should have been relatively straightforward to do, I reckon.  Running the game however, I am constantly treated with a crash and I suspect it is caused by this error dump.

(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpython.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpython.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(wine:3543): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

This got me researching into Ubuntu's state of multiarch support, figuring out that packages like 

gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad:i386 and python-gst0.10:i386 were conspicuously missing even though I had installed ia32-libs.  As it turns out, I have conflicting library packages and Ubuntu hasn't really fixed this particular issue.  Sad to say that it looks like I will have to dig up ole Vista to play this one.