[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[David Braley]

> I also had a first thought that the video card and the network card were
> sharing an IRQ or other resource.  On my laptop, "cat /proc/interrupts"
> shows that IRQ 11 is used by my wireless, display, and also 4 USB ports,
> ethernet, and audio...
>   

Yikes! Sounds much worse than my machine.
> Is this a PCMCIA wireless card?  If so, /etc/pcmcia/config.opts may help
> out.  It's been a long time since I had such a problem, but I used to
> always have to tweak it so that my PCMCIA cards didn't interfere with the
> serial port in the laptop.
>   

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?
> In general, I try to avoid any card that you have to build your own
> drivers.

Why? Is there a problem when doing updates, especially kernels that will
render the driver unusable? That would be a bummer if I had to
re-install the driver for this card each time I did a kernel update.
>   If you have a Mini-PCI slot in that laptop, and a built-in
> antenna, I'd recommend an Intel Pro Wireless 2100 (b) or 2200 (g) card.
> Dangerjim may even have one he's trying to get rid of.  Otherwise, have you
> considered going to ebay and getting an Orinoco Silver card?  They're
> pretty reliable.
>   

I may have to if this thing of compiling and installing the driver for
this card manually does not work out for the long run.


WARNING!!!!!! RANT COMING!!!!!

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
sure from the perspective of a seasoned Linux user, Fedora is a powerful
and polished distro. But from my perspective, I find it much more
difficult to get setup and working compared to other distributions like
Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and of course SuSE. I even find it harder than
Gentoo! Yes, Gentoo is a ton of work, you sit on your ass forever while
the thing installs/updates but I never felt like I was lost, or
experiencing any kind of weirdness like irq or strange permission
conflicts during the installation process. This of course is due to
their incredible documentation!

There is some very frustrating weirdness about Fedora I still can not
figure out. One thing that is really irritating is if I log into X as a
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
system. Networking tools/commands like ifup and ifdown are not
available. This is probably a bash config thingy or maybe it has
something to do with SELinux that is set-up by default on installation.
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
Linux anymore. What little I have managed to learn does not seem to
help, well to be honest, most of it does.  : )

END OF RANT!!!!!


Ahhh, I feel better now.

(Rolling up sleeves)

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

Take care all!

David