[frgeek-michiana] VL 5.9 on Compaq Evo 600 laptop
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:19:29 -0400
Display
I was incorrect about the display resolution. The default resolution,
thanks to OpenGL and Radeon, is 1400x1050. I didn't choose that
resolution; X-windows setup in vasm chose it automatically. The display
is very nice. Great video subsystem.
Battery
The battery was dead and wouldn't charge so I instructed the BIOS to
calibrate the battery as if it were a new battery. This caused the
battery to charge, and it held the charge. The battery capacity is 54600
mWh. The normal discharge load without wifi operating is between 16000
and 16330. This puts battery operation at 3 hours. Running wifi and
downloading files will diminish the charge more rapidly.
Printer
When connected to the household LAN, CUPS detected my shared network
printer automatically. However, I couldn't print to it. More on that later.
Wireless
I used my D-Link Atheros based 54g PCMCIA wifi card. VLwifi detected it,
and Wifi-Radar connected to the access point and received a DHCP IP
address from the router. However, the route wasn't functional.
The fix was to use VASM instead of the GUI utilities to setup ath0
(atheros based network device) using ndiswrapper, define the connection
to the access point and enable automatic start. I still had to manually
setup the correct route (route add default gw 192.168.x.x). The GUI
utilities may have botched the routing.
The downside of the VL 5.9 wifi subsystem, out of the box, is the user
needs to know the root password to run VLwifi and Wifi-Radar or VASM. VL
5.9 is very Unix-like in its approach to security. If we want to loosen
security enough for normal users to connect easily to wifi access
points, then it is up to us to re-configure each laptop during quality
testing.
Eventually, I whacked the networking stack trying to get the GUI to
work, and Goose re-installed VL 5.9 at the warehouse last night.
Tom
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