[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 11:16:26AM -0700, David Braley wrote:
>No the card sits in a Mini-PCI slot on the motherboard. I do not know
>where the antenna is, must be separate from the card, right?

Yes.

>Why? Is there a problem when doing updates, especially kernels that will

Mostly it indicates drivers that are not very stable.  Seems like once
they're stable, they go into the kernel before too long.  I've had a lot of
problems with the drivers that I've had to manually build.  Yes, having to
manually build the drivers is annoying, but that's the least of it.  Things
like it only working once after reboot or after kernel load, not supporting
scanning, hanging the box...

Wireless is important enough to me that I just want the damn thing to work
and to not have to deal with issues on it.  Currently, the IPW2x00 and
similar cards work really reliably.  In their early days, when I was
pulling them out of Source Forge, they were quite broken for around 6
months for me.

>I have been using Linux as my main desktop now for over 7 years, and I
>had know idea how much of a "newbie" I was until I tried Fedora. I am

Use what you're comfortable with...  My experience has been that a Fedora
install, for me, works with less effort than some others, as a desktop.
I'm not really that distro-religious.  I have systems I use regularly running
FC, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian.

>experiencing any kind of weirdness like irq or strange permission
>conflicts during the installation process. This of course is due to

Permission conflicts during the install?  What exactly was that?  Are you
talking about not being able to chown your DOS partition?

>user, in this case the user "david", open a terminal and su in as root
>or sudo a command, I have strangely limited powers to administer the

It picks up your environment, which by default doesn't have "/usr/sbin" or
"/sbin" in it.  On my laptop, I do "PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin" in my bash
profile.

>Who knows. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! Fedora does not behave like other
>distro's, so when a poor sap like me moves over, it is like I am not in

Fedora is not the only one to have this "problem", I have also seen it
under Debian.

>Now lets see...  how in the hell do I get Java, Flash, and MPlayer
>working on this damn thing ;-)

Read the release notes, it takes you through a lot of those things.  Open
up konqueror and it should bring up that page as the default page.

Sean
-- 
 "We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us
 by what we have already done." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability