So I spent much of the day at my mothers place trying to get her wireless network up and running. The SMC Barricade Wireless router worked as a charm and so did the CNET PCI card. The hard piece of the puzzle was the standalone SMC Wireless Print Server. Having experience with the Barricade I figured it would be a piece of cake to configure using the webinterface, but no. The print server is definetly not the big volume products that the barricade is for SMC and the interface showed it. It took me quite a long time to actually get the wireless part of the print server to work to begin with. Part of that was both the obscureness of configuring it and the fact that it seems you need to cycle the power of the print server frequently as part of configuring it.

Having gotten that working evertually I was on to the job of getting the printing to work. My mother uses WinXP on her machine, and the SMB based printing I got working after 30 minutes of fiddling, seemed to freeze the computer while the printing was going on. The docs suggested I use LPR based IP printing, but the tools included did not really work at all.
One more hour+ of fiddling and suddenly it started working. Sad part is that I am still not sure what I did in the end that made it work, but now it prints fine without freezing the windooze gui so hopefully everything will be fine from here. Not sure I am ready to recommend the print server to anyone. I mean it definetly works now and hopefully will keep working, but it was a pain to get there. Both the web gui and the included windows GUI tools seemed half developed and many of them simply did not work. I think that if SMC want to start shipping those things in numbers the price need to fall with at least two thirds and make the setup smoother.

The next step in the masterplan is to get the linux based laptop at her place working within the wireless network. Then she we hopefully use that to get aquinted with Linux and GNOME and I will also have a solution where I can get sure that moving her to Linux will not give me an increased support burden.

My GStreamer article put me back in a writing mood and I have some more stuff on my table I want to do now. Including some interviews and a couple of feature articles. Hope to get started/done with at least some of it during this upcoming week and also mail thomasvs to arrange stuff for leaving the crap web hosting service I use today.

Had a discussion with cinamod and donscarletti over my previous blog entry on SVG and how to handle it. My solution of not implementing something which when used reduced speed was not so popular :). Instead we agreed to try and write some documentation for artists as stuff got implemented with suggestions and advice about the cost usage of certain things. So when an artist want to make a icon theme he/she can check out this doc and get some ideas about what to do/not to do to keep GNOME humming along at top speed when people use their theme. Writting this docs will also hopefully push me into writing some more full docs on icon themeing in general. But for now I am waiting on GTK 2.4 as stock icon themeing will change there. So I want to see how that works out before making the docs.

Now on to apt-getting myself latest Fedora development packages :) Thanks hadess!