Church bells ring out the toll of our night.

[reddragdiva]

• Little Johnny's been going to town. redcountess has stopped talking about wanting to go back to Australia since reading things like this, this and this. UK readers: for fucksake, vote carefully in May.

We have solved the locked room puzzle. 1. Ignore the instructions on the wiki. 2. Put in the Debian Sarge floppies and point the installer at the Ubuntu CD, which it recognises as sufficiently Debianlike. This will install Ubuntu and its shitload of packages and then restart in the Ubuntu installer. Both installers will need you to tell them where their arses are in a couple of places, but apart from that they just work. 3. Install ndiswrapper, which is on the CD but not installed by default. 4. Install and configure the drivers for the Netgear card as directed on the ndiswrapper site. Profit!!!

We are now working on getting it to work after a reboot. Everything says the card is working except the card itself, whose lights flash that it isn't, and the notable lack of flowing data. Ubuntu 5.4 runs kernel 2.6.10; all versions 2.6.8 or later are known to have severe APM problems on the Thinkpad 560X. I suppose we could disable APM and hotplug. My fucking God I hate Linux. Did I mention that?

We have stolen the freshly-married cavalorn and lucybond, who are coming over here as Liz can't go there. So there. Assuming they didn't get too liquored up by the Marquis de Carabas and can find their way out again.

Comments

First they came for the Potter slashers...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I wonder what Howard will do after he has successfully dealt with the Harry Potter slash fiction menace. Perhaps round up all the furries and put them in detention centres?

(Or just go after MP3 player owners, who, under the copyright laws we've just been handed by Washington, are committing very serious crimes against intellectual property.)

Re: First they came for the Potter slashers...

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Perhaps round up all the furries and put them in detention centres?

You say that like it wouldn't be a good thing.

Re: First they came for the Potter slashers...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Of course, once they're done with the furries, they'll go for the goths, pagans, polyamorists and miscellaneous freakazoids who live Hillsong-unapproved lifestyles.

Shortly afterward, their local IT industry will, of course, completely collapse.

Re: First they came for the Potter slashers...

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Being that I am a boring white heterosexual male, that wouldn't be a bad thing for me.

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

IIRC UK law has already clamped down in this sort of area. rom what I remember the change effectively changed all the backissues of the Sun with models aged 16 or 17 to be child porn. The UK is a basket case already and I think AU is in competition with us to become more right wing than the US and to suck up to the chief weirdo.

[reddragdiva]

No, we're talking about textual depictions here.

"The 15 year old had passionate sex with the 19 year old." <-- this sentence is CHILD PORN under Australian law as it is written as of August 2004. As is Romeo and Juliet, by the way.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Does the Bowdlerised Victorian version of Romeo and Juliet up-age them to 18?

Perhaps someone should sue the publishers of the unexpurgated version of R&J, just to get the law invalidated. Then again, it may well be upheld. (Apparently Fanny Hill is still illegal in Australia.)

[mendel.livejournal.com]

FWIW, my TP570E has never been able to come back from a reboot with all bits intact; the only way things will work is with a power-cycle in between shutdown and boot.

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Fucking laptops. I can take a look at it at some point, if you'd like?

(Currently in Sydney, discussing Linux on laptops. Yay life!)

[reddragdiva]

This is apparently a known problem with this rather old model. My next approach will be to try older 2.6 series kernels with matching ndiswrapper. They have to match, of course.

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

It's more likely to be a problem with a driver in the brave new world of 2.6.8 - if I remember correctly, that's the first version that saves and restores PCI configuration if the driver doesn't specifically do so. As a handwavey guess, I blame the cardbus bridge (at least one of the TI parts that IBM use breaks in spectacular ways when the PCI configuration registers get rewritten. Jesus weeps bitter tears).

[reddragdiva]

Yes, that sounds like it. The TI cardbus bridge in this model has caused nightmares since it was built. Is there any simple way to switch off this behaviour short of handweaving kernels?

(The other annoying thing is that if FreeBSD supported enough functions on the box to be usable, it'd basically have the same problems.)

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Not really. When I have a moment I'll dig out the datasheets and take a look at this again - the kernel people haven't replied to my bugreport yet (it's about 6 months old), so filing a patch may work better...

[reddragdiva]

Well, aargh. That would probably be the most helpful thing, yes :-)

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Why do you torture yourself so.

[redcountess]

Because at least Linux can run on the 560X unlike FreeBSD ;-p

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

It would seem it can run openbsd (http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2004-September/002534.html).

[reddragdiva]

It can sorta walk it. More stuff works under Linux than under any other *nix.

[steer.livejournal.com]

My fucking God I hate Linux.

Sounds like it's mutual! :-)

[hserus.livejournal.com]

Try ACPI instead of APMD, and then check for buggy bios for your laptop model, may want to see if there are any upgrades that you can flash on first. Especially if your laptop is an older type, there'll be lots and lots of bugs fixed in a more recent bios

Oh, and watch for software suspend 2 - a lot of stuff just doesnt play well with ndiswrapper.

I'd recommend 2.6.11 with the cko4 patchset (con kolivas overloaded - its a meta patchset with ck, -ac, and lots of other stuff) http://kem.p.lodz.pl/~peter/cko/


I do think netgear has a native linux driver, so you wont have to futz around with ndiswrapper (so no weirdly named wlan0 interface that you have to watch out for). My centrino laptop has intel released drivers - ipw2200.sourceforge.net

[hserus.livejournal.com]

another thing - that netgear is likely to use a generic intersil prism chipset. Try http://d248-126.arenanet.fi/Prism2/

also upgrade to the latest version of wireless-tools from Jean Tourrilhees' page