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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