OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 on a WGT634U

Hello again! Sorry for the delay between updates. Now I'm back, though.

I have a Netgear WGT634U router, which until now has been running OpenWrt Kamikaze 7.x. Now I've taken steps to upgrade to Kamikaze 8.09.2, now that the NVRAM corruption bug in 8.09.1 has been fixed. The difference was astounding! I was a little shocked at first, since SSH wouldn't connect to it, so I instead pointed my browser at the router's port 80 and was greeted by the excellent LuCI interface, as shown above. Unlike the previous version of Kamikaze that I used, setting upp WPA2-PSK was a breeze, and setting up stuff like interfaces, mountpoints, DDNS and port forwarding (the latter two are available as LuCI modules). You also get NFS/FTP/Samba support for connected USB drives, so you are free to use any Linux supported file system unlike with the original firmware, which (obviously) would only permit FAT32 and NTFS "filesystems".

As soon as I set my root password, the dropbear SSH daemon started and permitted the router to be configured through SSH as usual.

I also should mention that my T-mobile G1 (and Nintendo DS) doesn't cause the router to reboot when connecting like with the previous Kamikaze release, so I'm finally completely satisfied with the stability. Since I set it up three days ago, it has forwarded every packet without any hiccups, something that even the original firmware failed to do.

Kudos to the OpenWrt team for this excellent release! My expectations for the next release are sky high. I would recommend any free software junkie out there with a compatible router to install/upgrade to this magnificent release and forget all your networking worries.

LXDE

Many of you have heard about desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE. You might also have heard of XFCE, an alternative which is relatively lightweight compared to the previous two. Perhaps you belong to the clique of people who believe desktop environments to be bloated, and are using plain X11 + window manager. What if there was a desktop environment, well integrated, though lightweight as a window manager? Well, there is.

LXDE has recently gained popularity. It is now included in Knoppix, a well known LiveCD distribution. Since Knoppix runs from a CD, there isn't much space for applications, so there's a need to reduce the size of the userspace programs that are always running, such as the desktop environment etc. That's exactly what LXDE is good at.

Included in LXDE is a desktop manager, a file manager and a panel. The desktop manager and file manager together forms something equivalent to nautilus in GNOME, which is managing desktop, icons and files. The panel is similar to gnome-panel, and even has similar menus (uses freedesktop.org .desktop definition files).

I'm currenty running LXDE on my Asus EeePC 4G (see screenshot), and it really feels fast compared to GNOME, while taking up much less memory. LXDE proves itself to work well on small/old systems with little memory and slow CPUs, but also on faster systems, leaving your precious memory for your applications. It's ideal for games with it's small memory footprint, using about 128MB less compared to GNOME on my system. This may not seem like much, but on a system with 1GB of RAM (or 512MB for that matter), it makes a difference.

As a bonus, there is a special launcher included that is similar to the one included in the default Xandros installation on the EeePC, so you can have the "easy mode" look if you'd like. I personally never was quite fond of that launcher, but it may be comforting for beginners to not be confused by desktop icons etc.

QtOctave

If you're a mathematician or physicist, you've probably used Matlab. If you, like me, have a strict budget or care about freedom, you've probably also used Octave. One thing you might have noticed about Octave, is that it's command line interface lacks many features compared to the graphical interface of Matlab. That's where QtOctave comes in.

QtOctave is a QT front-end to Octave. It supports, among other things, an overview of variables, functions and files. It also has a built-in editor. All these features make it easier to monitor your calculation and to write programs.

Download it from: http://qtoctave.wordpress.com/download/

Teeworlds

Yesterday, I was informed about a great game called Teeworlds. It can best be described as a cross breeding of Quake, Worms and Liero. The game is very fast paced and humorous, and I can almost guarantee that you will forget about time whilst playing it.

The game is available for about every operating system. If you run a GNU/Linux distribution, chances are it's already in your package management system. If not, just download the source and compile. Precompiled binaries exist for GNU/Linux(x86 and x86_64), Microsoft Windows(32 bit) and Mac OS X(universal).

Get it at: http://www.teeworlds.com