It's oh so quiet....

I'm pretending to be a single parent. My better half has gone off on a work assignment to Germany so I'm home alone. Well... As alone as one can be with a small child who won't go to bed until its rabid urge to watch Thundercats has been sated.

So I've made the best use of my time so far by finally getting the right drivers for my wireless card working on OpenSuse 10.3. The problem with my shiny, black HP Pavilion DV6000 is that the Atheros AR5006EG reported using lspci is, in fact, an AR5007EG. So, for those of you with the same problem, I would direct you here, then unpack, make, make install and, once you've done that, then modprobe ath_pci and it works. I've tested it fully and it works with Kismet and aircrack-ng, effortlessly putting the card into monitor mode. A much more elegant solution than using ndiswrapper.

More chatting to people I haven't seen in ages today. Thank you Facebook! And hello if you're reading this! :)

My bike broke down on me yesterday morning. I made the stupid mistake of leaving the lights on overnight which killed the battery and almost running out of petrol. Both of which culminated in a dead stop at a busy junction during rush hour. Thankfully a friend came and saved me by jump-starting the bike to get me home. Mental note: don't leave the lights on and fill regularly with petrol.

So.... For the rest of the evening I shall mostly be drinking wine and reading blogs.

It's the 'How to get the Ricoh webcam working in opensuse 10.3 on hp pavilion dv6000' post

After much faffing and hassle I finally managed to get this cam working.

Here is how I did it:

uninstall any previous versions of uvcvideo and/or r5u870 drivers open your favourite console and type:

kwrite /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

add 'blacklist r5u870' at the end of file (without quotations)

cd to any temp directory

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

cd trunk

make

make install

modprobe uvcvideo

Test if it works using gqcam or something similar

open YaST

open system

open /etc/sysconfig editor

expand system

expand kernel

select MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT

type uvcvideo

click finish

Reboot and enjoy.

Any questions, feel free to post.

It's simply marvellous

After several months of fighting with various installations of SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop I finally made the switch to OpenSuSe 10.3. It is quite simply amazing. All the problems I've had trying to get WPA working in Linux were solved in one fell swoop. All I had to do was install the firmware for the bcm43xx chip and restart the interface and lo and behold it worked. No need for poxy ndiswrapper solutions any more, it works with KNetworkManager and the WPA encryption is on! :)


So if there is anyone out there having difficulties with wireless and Linux I would highly recommend that you switch to OpenSuSe immediately. Not only has it resolved my wireless issue, but the Build Service is amazing and contains all the packages I've been installing from source, so I can now install them using YaST.

*big grin*