[frgeek-michiana] Laptops + pcmcia-cs

  • From: Richard Zimmerman <csxt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Free Geek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 19:28:34 -0400

Ok, it's WAS a fruitful weekend. My pumpkin wanted to stay inside cause it was so hot so I got a chance to finalize the laptop and get production rolling on it... NOT!

Problem: 2.6.15-1 kernel saying that pcmcia-cs is depreciated you need to fix it now! Ok, I goto the link referenced
( http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/pcmcia/pcmcia.html ) in dmesg. I follow the instructions which are NOT clear to me. From what I can tell Debian has already handled everything... (Remember the meaning of assume?)


So, after verifying as best as I can I remove the pcmcia-cs package... DEATH of the pcmcia bus occurs. It don't see Nada now no matter what I try. I've also killed said pcmcia nics so I have no path to reinstall anything. Now I think about this, I could have added the cdrom back into sources.list... Oh well, what is done is done.

Result: I'm reinstalling the system.... I'm also going back to the trusted 2.4 kernel


As for WPA(2) I did finally get it to work... It's NOT pretty, elegant or smooth but DOES work. I was in the final process of hacking a solution. Hopefully I can remember what NOT to do. There are a number of wpa managers that will allow u to roam without the fuss... NOT true. It's a lot of work to get ANY of them to work, let alone right... When I get the laptop installed and running again (it's doing it now) I'll reinstall wpa_supplicant and use it. I 'think' the fix right now was to add the /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant script to the end of if.up.d and the beginning of ip.down.d scripts. Then I think I'll have auto wpa support at home and hopefully a script I had (not hard to recreate) will handle public sites....



The problems (omissions) I had with Hibernate??? Works wonderfully, but plays havoc on the pcmcia cards... Defiantly will need to push hibernate command to hibernate.real and create a script to shutdown wpa / network / pcmcia and then a file to restore then once hibernate is back... The first trial run locked up the laptop totally. (Thinking back now was probably the pcmcia issue)



Lastly... Bought my new pcmcia wireless card in preparation to selling the faithful but under-featured for me Belkin to Albert. I settled on a Buffalo inc. Air Station Turbo G card. ( WLI-CB-G54HP ) Mainly it can support wpa2 correctly but most important, it has built in an external antenna jack! This allows me to (hopefully) get some decent range and watch trains at the same time. So far the card has worked without a hitch. I didn't even have to change the drivers (It uses a Broadcom chipset like the Belkin) which might mean no monitor mode for me, but at this point I don't care.


I need a working laptop... <grin>

Goose


P.S. I need to either 1) quit trying new things or 2) get a test laptop so I quit killing my production system <frown>


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