First, the good news.
I’ve been told by a few people that the stock 2.6.2527 kernel will support the RTL8187B natively. (Much more likely than not, this has nothing at all to do with my temporary patch.) I haven’t tried it out yet, especially since the fan on my Satellite failed miserably and the damned thing overheats every 10 minutes (those little laptop fan-pads really do work wonders, btw, I’ll have to pick another one up), but I’m crossing my fingers.
The good news is that the further bad news doesn’t really have anything to do with anything any of you need to worry about. :-) It has mostly to do with my spare time, or lack thereof.
In any case, here’s what’s going on in my drafts: Linux on the Wii, how to disassemble my particular model of Toshiba Satellite and unfuck its cooling system once the fan burns out (once I disassemble my particular model of Toshiba Satellite and unfuck its cooling system), a bit of Marine stuff, and some more miscellaneous Perl.
[EDIT: Updated the FAQ.]
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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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I was in the right neck of the woods, but the wrong tree.
It’s not hotkey.ko going away that was screwing me. I still don’t know exactly what it was, but I’ve figured out a workaround.
Updated the static page.
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Well, I finally got around to figuring out why hotkey support went away in the upgrade.
Turns out /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/hotkey.ko (which was there in 2.6.20) doesn’t exist anymore. I also can’t find it in the APT repositories, which means I’m SOL until I get around to compiling it by hand.
Greaaaat.
The LCD dimmer is also a little wonky. It goes bright-dark-bright-dark-bright-dark-dark-dark-dark (instead of bright-darker-darker-darker-darker-darkest).
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After I got sufficiently satisfied with Linux on my laptop, I got a new task: putting it on girlface’s Compaq Presario V5000.
It’s ironic, because her sound and video work full-on right off the bat, but her wireless card is funky. It’s a Broadcom of the bcm43xx variety (”Air Force One”, claims lspci). It connects, most of the time, but it drops packets like it’s cool. The ndiswrapper solution doesn’t seem to work at all, and I’ve tried several firmwares with the bcm43xx kernel module. Best guess at the problem: something changed in the bcm43xx source in the kernel. Best guess at a solution: diff, patch.
What’s even more odd is that it worked with the original version of Ubuntu I gave it (6.10 “Edgy”, I believe), but started showing problems as soon as I upgraded it to 7.10 “Gutsy”.
By the way, no, I’m not moving away from Debian. Crossbone, my mailserver/firewall/proxy/etc., still runs Debian unstable. But this is a laptop system, and Ubuntu is fairly mature — aside from which, I didn’t feel like fighting with APT to get my video card working at full capacity, let alone doing it the hard way. Ahh, the good ol’ days.
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Updated the static page.
Basically, you need to pass the parameter “model=toshiba” to snd-hda-intel after you download Realtek’s drivers (which are pretty much a wrapper around the official ALSA tarballs) from http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/.
Happy time is now!
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I’ve created this static page to detail what I know and don’t know about getting Linux working on my shiny new laptop.
Also, it has an extremely glossy display that exerts magnetic force on cat hair — from my patio, on cats in other countries.
And a dead pixel. *sigh*
UPDATE: I’ve also pointed http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/laptop/ and http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/a215-s7407/ to that page.
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