Back to (almost) Normal

Boy it's been a while! Sorry, but nothing really exciting happened until recently.

I installed 10.2 Alpha 1.

Everything works now. I got 3d support (nice 3d, I might add!) I'm back to playing my favorite games (had to build the devel Wesnoth) and everything. What truly amazed me was the way wireless worked this time. I plugged in my card, and when I booted up, it said "Found new network device RTL8185 a/b/g wireless network adapter". Mine doesn't support a, but close enough. The wireless is my problem this time. It can get signal, and accurately shows how much signal it has, but it still can't connect correctly! In KWifiManager, it shows the channel moving constantly, until I tell it in the settings to use my ssid. Then it locks on to channel 6, but I don't have connection. What I mean by this is that KWifi says that it's connected, there's traffic on the router, but I cannot get and IP. Even if I use dhclient, there's no ip (dhclient keeps not getting any "dhcpoffers" like it does on my eth0). I have reason to believe that this is exactly the same driver that Realtek suggests using (which is in fact a CVS version of the RTL8180-sa whatever driver). I'm thinking, should I try to rebuild? How would I go about using the newer module instead of the prebuilt one? It's amazing that I got this far without any work!

Remember, email me if you have solutions to these problems, please :)

poly-p man

X (again)

Sorry it took so long, I was playing with the settings for a long while.

Anyway, I got my original x server back up. No 3d support, but it worked. At first, I had just downloaded the mesa libs (with DRI). Those completely failed building. I decided to play around with Games Knoppix, because it always works perfectly. I noticed it had XFree86 instead of X.Org. So, what do I do? I built the latest (4.6.0) from source. Everything built perfectly. I ran startx, and there was nothing on the screen. I tried taking the config from Knoppix, and still nothing. I got a new one (with XF86config), and still nothing. What's happening? I have to reboot the computer and boot runlevel 3 (text only) if I forget and try to startup normally.

Any help?

poly-p man

Wireless Nightmare

I'm at it again: WIRELESS!!! I've NEVER gotten it to work correctly in Linux. The last time I tried, I got awful close. I was on SUSE 10.1 beta 6, with a RTL8185L card with a RTL8225 radio.

Anyway, I used Ndsiwrapper, and got to the point where the lights were blinking, there was a "wlan0", and Kwifimanager could identify the card. I could even do an 'iwlist scanning wlan0' and find and connect to the ssid. dhclient wouldn't work, and I couldn't assign a static IP. I was stuck, with a half working adapter.

I installed Agama (SUSE 10.1) final, and I just got around to trying it out again. First, though, because my computer is caseless, I had to prop it up with something. Maybe a book... Ah, here's one: Getting results with Microsoft Office 97 :) . Anyway, I booted it up, and I tried the Realtek driver ( from the website). It builds and everything, but I get an 'insmod: rt8180.ko: Unknown character in module' or something to that extent. I tryed Ndiswrapper (1.10?), with no luck. I went through the steps (build it, ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf, ndiswrapper -l) but there was no "ndiswrapper" module. I couldn't modprobe it (no error message), and insmod gives a 'file already exists'. I'm stuck, again.

Annoyed at the _one_ thing that Linux doesn't do,
poly-p man

Cpu fun

Sorry that I didn't post yesterday, the internet was down.


On my penguin, I'm playing around with x-windows, as you know. Right now, I have no window system set up correctly. I'm having fun with text, though.

I was playing with cpufreq-info, and found some cool things. My CPU is rated at 2.4ghz. It is controlled by cpufreq to be either 2400 or 2100 mhz. I connot control the frequency with cpufreq-set or anything. I found, however, that I can change governors. I decided that I would use the "ondemand" governor. That keeps my processor at 2.1 unless I am doing anything. I was having fun with Ctrl-Alt-Fx, because I could check the frequency on tty1 and run "primes" on tty2.

This is good because I like the full power when I'm doing stuff, but it'll stay cooler and use less power when not in use. My current setup is better than before I built the new kernel, because cpufreq didn't work before. I had a constant 2392.35 (or close) MHz.

Anyway, I can't reset Max, min, or freq. Is there any way to do this?

poly-p man