colin@
colino.net

There’s a new driver in 2.6.12-rc1, for the zd1201 chipset found in some USB wifi sticks. As I have one, I tried it. I had to patch a Makefile to get it to build.
The driver works really well, I found only two glitches: monitor mode wouldn’t work. I finally found out why. This is so easy to see the problem when you have the patch in front of your eyes, yet it took me a while to spot these!
Also, I noticed I couldn’t associate with my accesspoint when it was configured to use the Shared key algorythm instead of Open system. I found the reason by looking at the old driver based on linux-wlan-ng that Zydas released.
So now it works perfectly :-) I expected these three patches to be included soon in the mainline kernel.

Apart from that, I noticed that my hacked netapplet leaks awfully. I’ll have to give a look at that.

I found a nice applet by Robert Love that lets one handle his network connections conveniently. It has the inconvenient of working only with Suse, and requires a daemon to run.
Since a while, I use a little sudo’ed bash script named gnet to make all this switching between eth0 and wlan0 and all these APs less painful, so that I don’t have to type in commands every time I change network. This script uses a few config files and zenity, mainly, to handle user input, then it runs iwconfig and ifconfig to update the network. Here are a few screenshots of it:

choosing interface,

network configuration,

and AP.

You can either run gnet without parameters and set the whole stuff at once, or fix some parameters and get only the necessary screens.

So I spent a few hours hacking netapplet to remove all of its suse & netdaemon bits, and make it interface with my script. The script being sudo-ed with no password (Yes, I know), modifications can be done in one or two clicks.
As this works fine for me, I put the whole stuff up online here, in case it could help someone. Be warned, this is tailored to my needs and network usage habits, so there’s no guarantee that it’ll work for you. ./install.sh should do everything for you, you’ll just have to run netapplet and make the first configuration. Choose the interface from there, the AP if necessary, and “configure network settings”. It’ll initialise the gnet config files so that it knows about your network.

Sylpheed-Claws: We finally released, officialy, the 1.9.6 version which is gtk2 ! Yay :-) Comments on the mailing-list are quite encouraging.
Wifi & the kernel: After another kernel upgrade, Linux works flawlessly with sleep on my iBook. I needed only two USB-related patches so that the USB subsystem survives sleeps ok: one by Paul Mackerras, that fixes Oopses if you plug or unplug USB stuff while the laptop sleeps, and one by me, that repowers the USB ports unconditionnaly on wakeup – I noticed that the registers weren’t in a correct state on wakeup, thinking the ports were powered, but they’re not (and hence you can plug anything you want, nothing happens.
I also installed HAL from freedesktop, so that usb-storage works flawlessly (automatically creating mount points, mounting, and so on), but this broke (once more!) linux-wlan-ng, the driver for my prism2-based USB wifi stick. This driver sucks, it works whenever it wants (sometimes you have to re-plug the stick 5 times before it manages to upload the firmware), and gets broken with every kernel upgrade. It’s an external driver full of hacks (/sbin/hotplug is hardcoded in!). I got tired of this, and seeing that there has been an USB Zydas zd1201 driver integrated in 2.6.12-rc1, I bought a stick with this chipset (Peabird PEAB-WL-USB) and gave the driver a shot (I needed this micro-patch to get the driver to build). It works flawlessly ! Instant on, configuration via the standard iwconfig instead of idiot hotplug scripts like linux-wlan-ng, scanning works without oopsing, etc.
Only one little inconvenience with this driver, the link quality bits don’t work – some comments in the driver hint at a chip bug.

I just tried pyMusique; after having subscribed and wasted 0.99€ due to a bug in the saving code (probably due to something in my python setup), I downloaded one song. Got a .m4a file that plays well with mplayer and rhythmbox, and is convertible to mp3. Nice work!
Update: Too bad, Apple fixed this. Well, that lasted one week ;-)

I just put 1.0.3cvs2.1 online. Been a bit late on this, I’m currently quite busy with real-life stuff.

Politicians did not get it once more. Idiots.

I got a new server ! A nice 170MHz Ultra 1, that should have replaced entirely the old server; it was beginning to get slow under the load. After almost 24 hours struggling with disk copies and strange stuff, the new one is in place, and the speed gain is very visible here on this blog and on Sylpheed-Claws’ bugzilla. Yay!

I had lots of problems with mysqld though, which kept throwing Illegal Instructions at me. I tried three different compiles of 3.23, and even 4.1. Still no success; so the old server got a use as a mysql server. It’s probably a bit slower than having mysql on the new one, but it was too much annoying for me to try and make mysql run on the new one.

Let’s hope nothing breaks!