Wireless Weblogging

Posted by Eric Tue, 31 Dec 2002 05:00:00 GMT

On impulse, I drove to the computer store today and picked up a Cisco 350 series wireless networking card. It appears to work fine with Linux. I'm currently participating in an ad-hoc wireless network relayed through a laptop with two wireless interfaces--one to serve the local net, and a long-range card to relay traffic to a nearby building. Slick.

I still don't have a particularly good grasp on this technology--there's a lot of strange parameters and configuration options, especially under Linux. But it works.

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Hardware Fun With Linux

Posted by Eric Tue, 31 Dec 2002 05:00:00 GMT

I run Linux on a Sony VAIO PCG-FX200 laptop. For the benefit of other Linux FX200 users out there, here's a summary of my hardware experiences.

The laptop itself works fine. The screen is good, the battery will keep the laptop running for about 2 hours (under Linux), and the hard drive is fairly quiet. The CD/DVD drive burns CDs and plays DVDs (using Xine). The built-in Ethernet works fine (using the e100 driver, not the eepro driver). At one point, I had the i815em video card displaying 3D, but this appears to be broken at the moment.

Despite the respectable battery life, power management is a bit dodgy. In particular, there's no APM support, and I can't get the laptop to sleep or suspend using ACPI.

In the past few weeks, I've added a bunch of peripherals: a Cisco 350-series wireless card, a Maxtor 80GB external FireWire drive, and a PNY USB 1.1 SmartMedia drive. These all appear to work correctly.

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