Computer nargery
The bargain Wi-Fi PCMCIA card at the moment seems to be an Edimax EW-7108PCg.
OUCS shop price: £21
Scan price: £12.80, plus £8.22 postage.
Dabs price: £11.85, plus £3.25 postage.
I've basically paid six pounds for the convenience of not having to wait three days and then worry if it's been lost in the post.
Chipset: Ralink RT2561
Driver in kernel: no. But Ralink publishes source code on their web page, and there's also an active project to develop drivers which will eventually go into the kernel. In fact the box says "Linux Redhat, Fedora, Debian and SuSE" on the outside and the enclosed CD pretends to have drivers for those systems, but I'm not sure the author of the CD knew quite what they were doing because there are no version numbers anywhere but nevertheless they have supplied a single "rt61.ko" file for each system. In fact the "Fedora" one was compiled for 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 and the "Redhat" one was compiled for 2.4.20-8. But at least they tried.
WPA: supposed to be supported. However, the Ralink driver crashed my machine with an infinite spew of symbol dumps when I turned it on. The driver from the daily CVS snapshot of the rt2x00 project wouldn't play ball with wpa_supplicant (it just hung). So I recompiled my kernel with 8K stacks and went back to the Ralink driver. And now it works. It supports WPA directly rather than via wpa_supplicant, which is probably a good thing except that I have to hack the init scripts to supply the appropriate parameters via "iwpriv".
So that all took longer than I expected.
In other news, the ThinkPad 600X which I got in temporary replacement of the machine with the broken screen, which has now been replaced properly by the insurance company, developed a TrackPoint fault last week. Boot it up; mouse works fine for two minutes and then the cursor disappears to one side or other of the screen. Try to reboot it and it fails with "08611" error and refuses to boot at all.
But the good news is that having received my second TP600 keyboard from the same seller on eBay a few days ago, I have now put it in and the machine is happy again.
OUCS shop price: £21
Scan price: £12.80, plus £8.22 postage.
Dabs price: £11.85, plus £3.25 postage.
I've basically paid six pounds for the convenience of not having to wait three days and then worry if it's been lost in the post.
Chipset: Ralink RT2561
Driver in kernel: no. But Ralink publishes source code on their web page, and there's also an active project to develop drivers which will eventually go into the kernel. In fact the box says "Linux Redhat, Fedora, Debian and SuSE" on the outside and the enclosed CD pretends to have drivers for those systems, but I'm not sure the author of the CD knew quite what they were doing because there are no version numbers anywhere but nevertheless they have supplied a single "rt61.ko" file for each system. In fact the "Fedora" one was compiled for 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 and the "Redhat" one was compiled for 2.4.20-8. But at least they tried.
WPA: supposed to be supported. However, the Ralink driver crashed my machine with an infinite spew of symbol dumps when I turned it on. The driver from the daily CVS snapshot of the rt2x00 project wouldn't play ball with wpa_supplicant (it just hung). So I recompiled my kernel with 8K stacks and went back to the Ralink driver. And now it works. It supports WPA directly rather than via wpa_supplicant, which is probably a good thing except that I have to hack the init scripts to supply the appropriate parameters via "iwpriv".
So that all took longer than I expected.
In other news, the ThinkPad 600X which I got in temporary replacement of the machine with the broken screen, which has now been replaced properly by the insurance company, developed a TrackPoint fault last week. Boot it up; mouse works fine for two minutes and then the cursor disappears to one side or other of the screen. Try to reboot it and it fails with "08611" error and refuses to boot at all.
But the good news is that having received my second TP600 keyboard from the same seller on eBay a few days ago, I have now put it in and the machine is happy again.