[ncolug] Wireless Card Issues and HP and GLX and Beryl
- From: Michael Knisely <mknisely@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ncolug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:07:19 -0500
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Many of you know the story with my system and wireless, but here's a recap.
It came with a Broadcom Wireless MiniPCI card that just plain stinks
when used in conjunction with any OS, but especially stinks with Linux.
Originally I got it working using NDIS wrappers, but my system was
flaky to say the least that way. The smart FOSS guys found a way to
extract the info they needed from the Windows driver and then use a
native Linux driver to run it. That worked better from the stability
side of things, but it didn't change the fact that it was a card that
worked about as well as two tin cans and some string.
Next up I decided to replace the card with an Atheros card. If you
don't know, Atheros cards are FANTASTIC with Linux. When used with the
Mad-Wifi drivers, they're a swiss-army knife.
Well, I plugged in the card, booted the system, and was greeted with an
"error 104 - unsupported wireless card." With some research I found
that this is by design. HP has "whitelisted" a certain group of cards
to work in this system, and any other card hangs the machine at boot. I
went round and round, the basics are that they had no plans of changing
that limitation.
Well, that left me in an aqkward perdicament. I had a great card that I
couldn't use, and a stinky card that worked when it wanted to. Well, my
solution had been to just hot-plug the card at the grub menu and leave
it at that. I'd suspend the system when I wasn't using it and then all
would be good. The only time I had an issue was when I had to reboot my
laptop. At that time I would have to pull the card and reinsert it when
grub came up... and how often do you need to reboot your Linux machine?
It turns out when using Beryl just about once a day a reboot is
required. More specifically, the issue is with the XGL manager that I'm
needing to run to give me the GL desktop on which Beryl can run. AIGLX
is not working with my card yet, so I'm stuck again.
Well, I got sick of having to pull the card at boot, so I ripped it out
and have re-inserted the Broadcom card. I reaffirmed how much the card
STINKS, and am going to modify my Atheros card so that I'll have a
normally closed push button switch on the bottom (or side) of my laptop
and I'll just have to hold the button down until after grub boots.
Honestly, I'm going to get it done this time.
In the mean time, I've switched to a PCMCIA wireless card.
I'll update once I have more details. Oh, and I'll just setup a website
for the pictures so as to not aggravate anyone still on dial-up.
Mike K.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFFp8BGwyIgEcFsgrURApLRAJ9fyEIhEQWRVxPhf0N9ZZOO2G/zLgCeMybN
uXFxn5mgANFxsI6xFN8eklY=
=ZUC8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
To unsubscribe send to ncolug-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the
Subject field.
Other related posts:
