Laptop issues
Weirdnesses:
Atmel WLAN drivers don't compile, period. I ended up buying an Orinoco-based PC Card to replace the Atmel one... £27 off eBay, including postage from the US, and including an omnidirectional magnetic aerial ^_^ (the seller was targeting the cards towards wardrivers, and although I don't have a car to stick the aerial on, it was cheaper than buying the card without o.O Sean suggested I fix the aerial to my backpack and wander around Glasgow city center one day =P)
Battery management on the little laptop is a bit ... odd. My battery just jumped from 42% (1hr15min remaining) to 2% (5 mins remaining) and now it's oscillating between 2 and 3%.
Kernel 2.6.7 and 2.4.* (whichever kernel comes with bf2.4) really don't like my Realtek-based PCMCIA NIC. 2.4.20-xfs (Knoppix 3.1's kernel) handles it fine. The kernel that comes with Knoppix 3.4 also has problems (although it has way more problems than just that: to boot I had to disable ACPI, APM, and USB... o.O)
My Debian install is taking up 1.5Gb of my 4Gb HD -.- Not entirely sure why: Strat used to have a 0.7Gb HD, and X, IceWM, Firefox and enough stuff to run a full web/ftp server and NAT box fitted nicely (although I did occasionally run out of space when apt's package cache got full.) I assume that Knoppix installed billions of extraneous packages, and although I've gone out of my way to remove most of them, there are still an awful lot of them left, quite a few of which appear to be outwith the reach of apt/dpkg...
Other stuff: it hit me the other day that a laptop would actually make a rather nifty light-duty server/NAT box - much like what Altair's been relegated to now (it used to have a monitor and run X, but I never used it so its monitor got sold and I just ssh into it now.) Sean and I have been talking about XBox servers since forever, but a laptop might be even more quiet and non-intrusive. I regularly see laptops with broken screens and no batteries on eBay ... ideal! =P
This entry was brought to you by tommorow's Maths exam, and my unwillingness to study for...
[edit] More Linux weirdness, on Razor this time: my digital camera doesn't work >< gphoto2 detects it (it's a Kodak CX6230) and can read the directory listing, but throws up PTP I/O errors when I try and get files. I checked out the mailing lists: several people seem to have reported a similar thing, and none of the advice given is helpful -.- [/edit]
[edit, later] Gah. Another laptop weirdness - I can't get the sound card to work. It's an ISA non-PNP Yamaha OPL3SA2 ... and no matter what I do, I can't get the driver to recognise it -.- I've looked in the BIOS to get I/O values, and the first time it's modprobed, the driver appears to recognise the card, but it keeps giving an error and suggesting misconfigured I/O ports. Dmesg gives a bit more detail, but not much more - "Control I/O Port 0x538 not free." Sigh. Changing the I/O values just results in the driver not finding the card at all.
It's pretty disappointing, because when this laptop ran Windows, it was quite a nice little bedside terminal, playing MP3s streamed from Strat. I'd really have liked to have sound capability under Linux...[/edit]
Atmel WLAN drivers don't compile, period. I ended up buying an Orinoco-based PC Card to replace the Atmel one... £27 off eBay, including postage from the US, and including an omnidirectional magnetic aerial ^_^ (the seller was targeting the cards towards wardrivers, and although I don't have a car to stick the aerial on, it was cheaper than buying the card without o.O Sean suggested I fix the aerial to my backpack and wander around Glasgow city center one day =P)
Battery management on the little laptop is a bit ... odd. My battery just jumped from 42% (1hr15min remaining) to 2% (5 mins remaining) and now it's oscillating between 2 and 3%.
Kernel 2.6.7 and 2.4.* (whichever kernel comes with bf2.4) really don't like my Realtek-based PCMCIA NIC. 2.4.20-xfs (Knoppix 3.1's kernel) handles it fine. The kernel that comes with Knoppix 3.4 also has problems (although it has way more problems than just that: to boot I had to disable ACPI, APM, and USB... o.O)
My Debian install is taking up 1.5Gb of my 4Gb HD -.- Not entirely sure why: Strat used to have a 0.7Gb HD, and X, IceWM, Firefox and enough stuff to run a full web/ftp server and NAT box fitted nicely (although I did occasionally run out of space when apt's package cache got full.) I assume that Knoppix installed billions of extraneous packages, and although I've gone out of my way to remove most of them, there are still an awful lot of them left, quite a few of which appear to be outwith the reach of apt/dpkg...
Other stuff: it hit me the other day that a laptop would actually make a rather nifty light-duty server/NAT box - much like what Altair's been relegated to now (it used to have a monitor and run X, but I never used it so its monitor got sold and I just ssh into it now.) Sean and I have been talking about XBox servers since forever, but a laptop might be even more quiet and non-intrusive. I regularly see laptops with broken screens and no batteries on eBay ... ideal! =P
This entry was brought to you by tommorow's Maths exam, and my unwillingness to study for...
[edit] More Linux weirdness, on Razor this time: my digital camera doesn't work >< gphoto2 detects it (it's a Kodak CX6230) and can read the directory listing, but throws up PTP I/O errors when I try and get files. I checked out the mailing lists: several people seem to have reported a similar thing, and none of the advice given is helpful -.- [/edit]
[edit, later] Gah. Another laptop weirdness - I can't get the sound card to work. It's an ISA non-PNP Yamaha OPL3SA2 ... and no matter what I do, I can't get the driver to recognise it -.- I've looked in the BIOS to get I/O values, and the first time it's modprobed, the driver appears to recognise the card, but it keeps giving an error and suggesting misconfigured I/O ports. Dmesg gives a bit more detail, but not much more - "Control I/O Port 0x538 not free." Sigh. Changing the I/O values just results in the driver not finding the card at all.
It's pretty disappointing, because when this laptop ran Windows, it was quite a nice little bedside terminal, playing MP3s streamed from Strat. I'd really have liked to have sound capability under Linux...[/edit]