zen.org Communal Weblog

Our friend Michael got a Fujitsu Lifebook P7010D (which was in my running list of cool laptops). But he needed it to run both Window$ and Linux.

About six months ago, I set up SuSE on it. Most things worked, but the wireless support didn’t really do well, even with the latest MadWifi stuff.

To try from scratch, Michael did a fresh install of Ubuntu and was interested in having another shot at making things work. After switching him from Gnome to KDE (which lets you use the YYYY-MM-DD format for dates, in comparison to not finding anything similar for Gnome), an install of the 915resolution package (installed via its normal package interface under Applications -> Add/Remove -> Advanced) and its magic modifications of the BIOS video settings finally made it be 1280×768 instead of 1024×768. This is going to be filed as a bug so Ubuntu can help get rid of this step in the process; it should’ve seen the kind of video device in use and automagically installed and used this.

To make the wireless work, I just followed the great HowTo made by the MadWiFi folks. I had to install make and linux-source-2.6.15 in order to actually build it, in addition to taking these steps:

cd /usr/src
tar -jxf linux-source-2.6.15-26-386.tar.bz2
cd linux-source-2.6.15-26-386
ln -s `pwd` /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/build
make oldconfig
make
… and hit ctrl-c once it set up all the headers and such and started building things like mounts.o

Of course, none of this should really have been necessary—in particular, I’m sure I just missed some other step that would’ve created the build symlink for me.  But, more to the point, Ubuntu’s version of the madwifi/Atheros support should be getting updated, shouldn’t it?