Perl: Terminal does not support AddHistory

If you see the error when running Perl shell, you need to install Term::ReadLine::Perl.




That's all there is to it. Have fun!.

changing manually wireless connection to be controlled by knetworkmanager

knetworkmanager is a Network Manager for KDE4. It is hated or liked by users and usually not in between. I personally like it although it has its fair share of bugs. But I like Mandriva's net_applet more. It is stable and more reliable. It is prefered by many Mandriva users. However, if you are stuck with recent problems (bug?) of perl in Mandriva Cooker like me, you are forced to use command line of wpa_supplicant or iwconfig or using gui application like knetworkmanager. 

In Mandriva, you can change which network manager control the wireless connection by changing the option in net_applet or you can manually change in file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0. If you want knetworkmanager in control of it, you just have to change this line to yes:

NM_CONTROLLED=yes

Connecting to wireless AP with WPA/2 security using wpa_supplicant

Recently, my cooker updated perl packages and it broke all of drak* family especially drakconf and net_applet. net_applet is the network manager for Mandriva in applet form. I can also use draknetcenter. Now the problem is I cant open net_applet and knetcenter due to this error:

/usr/bin/perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libDrakX/auto/c/stuff/stuff.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Gthr_key_ptr

So how do I connect to wireless AP? I dont know how to use iwconfig to connect to such AP or can I? After googling, I found a solution: wpa_supplicant. In Mandriva, I just have to run this command (as root):

wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

If you have setup the connection before with draknetcenter, you dont have to edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf. If not, you have to manually edit the file to suit your environment. it is heavily documented. 

Then you have to run dhclient to get IP address from the AP or other dhcp server:

 dhclient wlan0

wlan0 is my wireless interface. Please change it according to your environment. I bet the broken packages will be updated sooner so that I can use net_applet again.

Have fun!

Happy New Year and distros for router

Happy New Year everbody. Hope 2012 will be a great year for Linux. In 2011, I tested several distros for different purposes. For routers, I found several free distros that serve as a really good gateway for my network. Among others are:

1. Zentyal - this is the best distro for routers. Fully featured with webcache, url filtering, load balancing for multiple lines and has 32-bit and 64-bit version. It is based on Ubuntu.
2. ClearOS - Also the best but it doesn't have 64-bit version (at the time of this writing. recently there's a 64-bit release but still in beta stage). Has many features as Zentyal. Based on Redhat.
3. pfSense - this is not Linux-based. It is freeBSD-based firewall and router. It has bug with my servers pertaining to PCI-E. So I dumped it. It's good but the bug prevent it from being operational.

Others:

• Untangle - didn't try it because the free version has no webcache feature.
• Zeroshell - tried it but a little awkward to use.

So I chose Zentyal as my distro for my server router and info from its web, I need to add more RAM and bigger hard disk to serve more than 500 users.

Happy New Year everybody! Thanks for reading.