In in the mid-2010s I started playing about with Linux, specifically 32-bit Linux Mint 17.1 Mate Edition. When that reached End of Life I switched to Debian and changed to 64-bit during the Buster era. I've stuck with the Mate desktop environment though as it seems the best balance between the barbarity of things like XFCE and the silly bells and whistles of things like Unity — Gnome 3 is beyond the Pale.
I've taken to this like a duck to water but have had to fix a few problems. These seem quite common but Google results turn-up a myriad of often contradictory answers, and a lot were written for older versions of Linux rather than current ones.
Atheros AR2413 Wif-Fi Card
I had trouble connecting to the internet on a Toshiba Satellite L30-101 lap-top. Very occasionally it would work but usually it either wouldn't work at all or would be about as slow as dial-up. This turned out to be a problem with the Atheros AR2413 wi-fi card with which it is fitted — it had given me a bit of grief under Windows as well.
The best answer would be to change it or use a USB adaptor. If you either don't want to do that or get it going until you get the alternative parts it can be fixed. The trouble is to do with hardware encryption and it can be set-up do that in software. The snag is that this is more work for the CPU so will, in theory, slow things down. I've never noticed it though.
Firstly open a terminal and type:--
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/ath5k.conf
now enter:--
options ath5k nohwcrypt-1
and then save the file and exit nano or whatever you were using to write it.
Next run:--
sudo modprobe -rfv ath5k
sudo modprobe -v ath5k
then type:--
sudo nano /etc/modules
and add:--
ath5k
on it's own line at the end. Save the file and exit nano or whatever you were using to write it.
Keyboard Remapping
I did some keyboard remapping using xmodmap and found that sometimes my new definitions failed to load after re-booting despite having them set to load on start-up. I suspect that it loads OK but something further down the list of Startup Applications cocks it up — unlike a DOS AUTOEXEC file you can't set the order in which things are automatically run when Linux starts. My fix for this was a simple script like this which I called keyb:—
sleep 10
xmodmap /home/joe/.Xmodmap
I then made it executable by running chmod 755 keyb and added it to Startup Applications. Obviously the path to your .Xmodmap file will be different to mine.
