During the last day of the Austrian Perl Workshop I tried to get the wireless on my new $job-laptop (a Dell Latitude D610) working. In vain, because I either missed the right firmware for the wireless card, or my kernel was to old (2.6.15, pft...). Luckily, maks knows a great lot about kernels on got me on the right track.
So Friday night I hunted for the right set of kernel options, modules and firmware to get the wlan working. Originally my plan for Friday night was to grill my brain with some TV, but this was prevented by a certain sporting event that our dear national broadcaster is showing all day long (only interrupted by commercials and Formula 1 coverage! Argh! If I'd care for a 24 hours sport programm, I'd subscribe to a proper pay service. BUT I DON'T. /me hates sport on TV!)
Sorry bout that, .. back to my journal
Anyway, after several attempts with kernel compliation, I got the wireless card working. And nicely! My old one really sucks, compared to this (btw an, Intel Pro Wirelss). With the new card I can finally scan for accesspoints. I found three, but all encrypted. Damn those computer magazines to inform all of those people to enable encryption etc...
On Saturday the TV was again only playing soccer, Formula 1 and Rosamund Pilcher romatic dramas (I hate those even more than sports. German actors playing Irish/English people in Ireland/Scotland! And most of them have problems pronouncing the english names of their characters...). So I decided to try to get software suspend working (suspend to disk/ram).
And, surprisingly, after a few kernel compilations and a bit of config fiddleing, it worked! I can now suspend to disk (which takes aprox 45 sec to shut down and reboot) and to memory (which is fast as hell). Yay! No more Mac envy! A big ++ to all kernel and suspend2 hackers, and to the gentoo kernel maintainers. Now I'm not sure if want to try to get it working on my other, private laptop (a Dell Inspiron 8500, which is nearly three years old, and quite different from the new one, hardwarewise). It might mean moving from Debian to Gentoo, which is a pain. OTOH, maybe it's working with recent Debians, too...
When not compiling kernels and bitching about the TV programm, I read The Da'Vinci code (in english), which a friend of us lend to me on Saturday. I'm not sure why there was so much fuzz about it. It's basically a Stephen-King-style version of Umberto Ecos "Foucault's Pendulum". And the church isn't even the true villain - it't a guy how want's the truth to be known...
Anyway, still a nice read for a lazy sunday in the park. I just wonder how they manage to translate some of the puzzles to german. E.g "P.S. Find Robert Langdon" is singular and plural imperativ in english. German singular and plural imperativ of 'find' are different.
The puzzle I liked most was the one with Sophia encoded in Baphomet (though it was obvious to me as soon as I read the name 'Sophia' that it would be more than just a name, given it's meaning ('wisdom' in ancient greek)).
Time to go to bed now...
I'd be interested in hearing more about your suspend2 setup details. I've fiddled with suspend before, but it always brought more headache than benefit. Lately I've been using initng for speedy boots and shutdowns.
Re:Suspend
domm on 2006-06-13T18:32:49
I've got the config on my work-laptop, which is in the office (while I'm home ATM). I'll take a look tomorrow, but I basically followed this guide: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Software_Suspend_v2 with thesys-kernel/suspend2-sourcespackage.But I think successful suspending depends greatly on the right hardware. Eg I didn't get it wworking with my other, Nvidia-based laptop. But maybe it works now, as my last attempt was with 2.6.11
