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.]
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
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.
