[Leaplist] Re: REVISITED: Fedora 9 on Gateway P-7811FX "Centrino 2" notebook

[Richard F. Ostrow Jr.]

<quote who="Bryan J. Smith">
> On Wed, 9/3/08, Richard F. Ostrow Jr. <rich at warfaresdl.com> wrote:
>> That's a bit distressing...
>
> I confirmed at my hotel that the 5100agn works with the iwl4965
> driver and either of the 4965 or 5000 firmware modules.  It's
> unencrypted though.

Bummer. I've confirmed that mine works encrypted, but I haven't been able
to get my scanner working (If I know the network I'm connecting to, it
will find it and connect, or it will find anything and connect
(unencrypted) if it fails to find my network).

>> It took me quite a while to figure out how to enable it
>> (kernel starts with the RF_KILL switch enabled, but I
>> managed to tie a ACPI keyboard function to toggle that).
>
> I'd be interested in knowing what was involved.  This is
> still something I have to tackle myself.

Well, a starting place is to look at the switch itself. On my laptop, this
is located at /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl4965/000:04:00.0/rf_kill

The contents of this file are 0 if the RF_KILL switch is disengaged, or 1
if RF_KILL is engaged (meaning 1 if no wifi, 0 to enable wifi).

Here's a script I wrote before I found a kernel module for asus laptops:

[code]
#!/bin/bash
killswitch=/sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl4965/000\:04\:00.0/rf_kill
case `cat $killswitch` in
   0)
   /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 stop
   echo '1' > $killswitch
   ;;
   1)
   echo '0' > $killswitch
   /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start
   ;;
esac
[/code]

In my case, I found that loading the "asus_laptop" kernel module sets this
to 0 as soon as it loads, and enables the button to toggle it (via ACPI
messages). Probably doesn't do the same on yours, but if we're just
talking about the switch, a simple script can set it to 0 or 1 on demand.

> P.S.  Really hating Vista's "reliability."  I'm about to
> "give up" on even Windows gaming with it.  E.g., Hellgate
> London supposed has "special features" for DirectX 10 only.
> The colors are totally dorked when I load either the base
> or fully patched version, and have to go back to DX 9 mode.

I'm beginning to look more at game developers than vista on some of
these... some of these games just plain don't work. Heck, some patches are
being released that actually screw more things up than they fix (I just
tried a neverwinter nights 2 patch, going from version 12->13, and now all
the graphics are screwed up, where they were fine before). I have yet to
see any DX-10 enhancements myself, though... bioshock on my laptop looks
just like bioshock on my desktop (with a 7900 GTX on DX-9).

-- 
Life without passion is death in disguise


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