What I did on my vacation from reality

I fixed the periodic freezing by reusing my old /etc/X11/xorg.conf and installing xorg-driver-fglrx. Win.

Still trying to figure out why only one CPU is enabled.

Maybe I should just go back to Slackware.

Turns out it’s not just the mouse freezing — it’s the entire X display. It doesn’t seem to be the system, as the console works alright.

I’m working on a solution (leaning towards a downgrade to Ubuntu’s 8.04 server until the one with 8.10 works).

Also, it’s still only running on one CPU. I don’t know why.

I got a wild hair up my ass to try out Ubuntu 8.10. It’s not bad, all in all, but I figured the world would be interested to hear my experiences with it. When it calms down a bit, I’ll be updating the laptop page.

tldr: RTL8187B works very well with 2.6.27 kernel. Ubuntu users, I recommend you wait for things to stabilize a bit before upgrading to 8.10.

One of these days, I’ll get un-lazy and compile myself a kernel that actually works.

Anyways, here’s what I’ve found so far with Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic.

• Problem: “SMP disabled” (possibly related to “BIOS bug, APIC #0 not detected”)

  I tried pci=noacpi, and the kernel comes with noapic nolapic already. No joy.

• Problem: Mouse is insane

  rmmod psmouse && modprobe psmouse seems to improve, but not completely fix, the situation.

• No fglrx :(

  Yeah, they haven’t gotten around to it, yet. I was aware of this in advance and chose to proceed anyway. I can live without hardware acceleration for now.

• RTL8187B support, at last!

  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read correctly. The driver gives a warning to the effect that it’s experimental and could damage your hardware, but it reports signal strength properly and connects to my WEP network. There is also a new network interface, wmaster0, which I am very much looking forward to playing with. Much like my original hacks at the RTL8187 driver, I’m working on backporting it for my own use, and I’ll probably end up posting it here, but I haven’t even gotten to the point where the damned thing compiles under older kernels yet. Again, I am not a dedicated kernel hacker, I just hacked at it because it was in my way.

I’m booting the 2.6.24-19-generic kernel after the 8.10 upgrade. The fonts seem to have changed a bit, but the mouse is sane and SMP is working well. fglrx is still absent, most likely due to the fact that I backed up and deleted my xorg.conf (new xorg supposedly doesn’t need a config).