Linux on the Laptop

I’ve been muking with my laptop a good bit more, I found only one problem: Wireless is a bit iffy. There’s alot of times when I ifup wlan0 that it will sit there trying to get DHCP and end up doing nothing. Of course if I iwconfig the ap mac, essid and channel — the connection is alot more likely to work (though a script in /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/ is supposed to take care of that).

I ended up writing a quick perl script that does an iwlist (card) scanning and then configures the card accordingly — and now wireless works beautifully. Once I get in range on some other AP’s to test a few more things on the script (like how to handle WEP) I’ll share it with the world.

Also my stupid sound still doesn’t work. I need to get that fixed as I like sound, and periodically I think something tries to play a sound and locks up the machine.