I’ve been using ndiswrapper to drive the Broadcom wireless card in my Dell D600. I recently switch from gentoo back to Fedora. The betas of Fedora Core 3 include a new application called NetworkManager that automatically switches network connections between wired and wireless based on link status. After reading more about it, I decided to give it a try on the D600.

One problem. ndiswrapper doesn’t create the necessary files in /sys that NetworkManager needs to recognize the card.

I haven’t written any serious C in 5 years easily, and I’d never delved into the Linux kernel. Using the tg3 driver as a reference, I patched the latest release of ndiswrapper to have sysfs love. Patch is at the NetworkManager list and here as well. It applies to ndiswrapper-0.11/driver/wrapper.c.

Gentoo is gone, long live Fedora.

The Gentoo experiment is done. I ran it mostly to be running the same OS on the Intel and SPARC machines. Since I’m selling off all the SPARC stuff (anyone wanna buy an Ultra 1/170E?) I don’t need to keep the OS the same. I also got very tired of the whole “I want to install this, so now I must watch 1,200 lines of compiler stuff go by.” I did that in the 80s and 90s, it doesn’t interest me now. I’ve built X11R4 more times than I can count, I’d rather run the binaries they produce. The whole idea of “USE flags, only compile in what you need” didn’t work for me. I’m a clutterhound on my laptop: if it can be there, then chances are I might need it someday so I’ll install it. My USE flag was 9 lines long, so I compiled everything in. Bah.

The cluster at work runs Fedora and I’ve run RedHat in various versions since 1997, so I grabbed the latest beta of Fedora Core and threw it on. Impressions so far:

• Evolution 2.0 kicks serious ass. I like the new “task” buttons at the bottom, as opposed to the clunky old method of listing them in the folder list.
• X.org 6.8.1 works very well on the D600’s Radeon Mobility M9. Using MergedFB with an external LCD gives me a 2680×1050 desktop. I still can’t get the attached LCD to run at anything other than 1400×1050, but I’m not complaining. As a benefit, 6.8.1 will now turn off the LCD light when the screen blanks, handy for saving power when on battery. It also has the new “DynamicClocks” support, to slow down the video processor during less intensive tasks. More battery savings foo.
• GNOME 2.8 is amazing. There’s too much to list here that is goodness. Volume manager, keyring, NetworkManager, HAL/DBUS (Ok, not GNOME exclusive), vino, just GNOME it.
• SELinux is enabled in enforcing mode by default in this beta. I’m running the ‘targeted’ profile, which only enforces policies for certain daemons and processes. I might turn on ’strict’ mode later and see what breaks.
• Firefox is included. No more adding it first thing after install.
• udev is enabled by default (no more static /dev)
• and too much more to list.

I still have to do the typical gotchas specific to this laptop: it needs ndiswrapper to use the Dell internal wireless, the smartcard reader is still useless bits, and hot plugging the CD/DVD into the bay doesn’t work. Battery life is excellent tho, much better than when gentoo was loaded on.

Long live Fedora.

I’m really starting to like Gentoo. I like how customizable it is compared to other distros. I can build a lean server from the same install media that I build my fat laptop. Configuration is simple, especially setting up different profiles for my roving laptop (work, home, wireless). And, doing a scripts/bootstrap.sh or emerge system and seeing it use distcc to build across a cluster is pretty neat.

I have a huge TODO list for the home network, tho. Right now storage is spread across both SPARC machines, as well as the PC. chele’s XP machine has the largest drive in the house (60G), but it isn’t on all the time so I can’t use it as a fileserver (yes, I could steal the drive but that’s more work). Ideally I should sell off the SPARCs and use the money to build a fileserver for the basement, but having cut my early Sun hardware (go go diskless Sun 3/60!) I’m loathe to give them up. Plus, I can’t imagine I’ll get more than $100 for an Ultra1/170E. If only they supported IDE drives, for large internal storage…..

X.org rebuild complete, back after reboot.

I’ve switched all of my home machines over to gentoo linux. Previously, the x86 PCs were running Fedora, while the Ultra1 SPARC machines were running debian. I’ve been watching gentoo for a while, and with the release of 2004.0 I decided to switch. The nice thing about having them all on the same distribution is that I can share configuration/packaging information between all of them. Now to get cross-compilation working..

I’m going to switch the laptop over as well. I may end up back at Fedora on that, because the cluster and servers at work are running a mix of Fedora and RedHat. We’ll see.