What I did on my vacation from reality

I finally broke down and bought something off Thinkgeek: the Wi-Fi Detecting Watch.

[EDIT] Wait, I lied, I also have a “got root?” sweatshirt.

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So, being in the military, I get one of these nifty little dealies. I never bothered to look into them, but I saw a USB reader for $25 when they shipped us out for training, so I figured, what the hell.

I haven’t bothered to get really into smartcard hacking (yet?), but I have got it locking and unlocking my screen (and other assorted fun things when my friends plug their cards in).

Source - requires Chipcard::PCSC

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That sucked.

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I’m going away for a few weeks. I won’t be bringing my laptop, and by the time I get back, my inbox and spambox will probably be full as hell.

I will be back; I’m not ignoring your emails, and I’m not gone until after the weekend.

In other news, my Twitter account is mostly unscrewed, with only the Jabber updates still broken. Thanks, guys!

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I got Ubuntu upgraded to 8.04. It took me a while to figure out that esound makes things very unhappy. If your Gnome desktop is hanging or otherwise misbehaving, try “sudo killall esd”, and “apt-get remove esound”.

Also, the rtl8187b driver does, indeed, dislike the 2.6.24 kernel (mine is 2.6.24-16-generic, and no, I don’t know why I’m not using the 64-bit version). I applied Hin-Tak Leung’s patch (here), and all is well — or, at least, as functional as it was with the 2.6.20 and 2.6.22 kernels.

I also got Cc’d in a couple emails to Andrea Merello, who basically said …well, to be honest, I have no idea what the hell it boils down to. I guess there’s still someone at the helm of the RTL8180 driver, and the rtl-wifi project isn’t as dead as it looks.

Also, thanks to the people who donated a couple bucks! You made me lose a bet with datamorph, damn it. :-)

Sorry again for the lag, I’m working on improving.

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I’ve recently started a new job, with… well, the hours suck. I know I’m lagging pretty hard, but I have been updating the rtl8187b section with patches from Mister Leung, and I have had a few emails between me and Andrea Merello, the original r8187 maintainer. Hopefully, the SF rtl-wifi project releases some stuff soon, if they haven’t already. Keep an eye out there, folks. The plan is pretty much to let the pros take over.

Speaking of sucky hours, I know I lag a lot, and I get a lot of emails, especially about WPA. (Try wpa_supplicant!#!%@$^!!!!!)

Also, I’m hearing about a lot of kernel crashes, explosions, etcetera. The version I use is compiled against Ubuntu’s 2.6.22-14-generic kernel. I don’t know what Red Hat et. al are doing differently, but you might want to try downloading the official kernel source tree — vendors have been known to do strange things to their source trees.

One last thing. If anyone knows any admins at Twitter, could you please get them off their asses to implement account undeletion already? :P

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Okay, I finally found a decent picture of me in that parade. Yay.

(That’s me in the back.)

Twitter’s fucking down again, which is too bad, because I just wrote a mail handler to tell me who’s following me. Woot, looks like it just came back up.

And, finally, I need reports on the new version of the RTL8187B driver that Mister Adams sent me, please. Does it compile? Does it work? Does it turn your computer into Oprah?

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I’ve put up the contributed version of the RTL8187B driver I received from a Mister Adams that supposedly works with the 2.6.24 kernel. Note I haven’t tried it yet (I’m not in a hurry to upgrade from 2.6.22, even with that local exploit going around), and the only other person I sent it to reported a kernel panic. Use at your own risk.

Also, I was lucky enough to get called up to be in the Holiday Bowl Parade in San Diego in 2007. This was pretty much the only picture I could find (that’s me in the back):

If anyone else happened to be there and snap a couple, think you could send ‘em my way?

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So, I’m in cammies for a few days.

I spent the day sacrificing my lower back for my country. The next few days are likely to be the same.

Why can’t the Corps ever make anything LIGHTWEIGHT? Why does everything have to weigh four hundred freaking pounds?

Anyway, I’m taking Monday off, and then I’m going to start getting the site back on track. Hopefully.

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I installed a new tagboard. Since I didn’t feel like doing the work myself all over again, it’s from here, and it works pretty well so far. I figured it’d help you guys who’re paying more attention to the laptop page out a bit more, if nothing else. We’ll see how it goes.

Speaking of which, yes, I know I’m still lagging on things. I got an email from a gentleman who said he patched the RTL8187B driver for the 2.6.24 kernel, so I sent it to another gent who tried it out, and got back a report of a kernel panic. D’oh! (The next post will have a link to the source.) The best way to reach me right now is probably one of the contact links in the sidebar.

I really am trying to get the ball rolling again, and I know that page is getting pretty cluttered. I was honestly just throwing some source and docs out there, I didn’t intend to become the maintainer of anything besides the Linux-Laptops site, but since I’m headed towards the top of Google for the RTL8187B, I might as well do what I can. :-)

I’ll keep you posted.

PS - Would the sir who sent me his 2.6.24 patch please email me again? I still have the patch, but lost your email, and you forgot to add your changes and contact info in credits. ;-)

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