Eyes crossing
May. 31st, 2008 01:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI procrastinated on writing my weed bio paper a lot today... between wanting weekend recreation, and having a new toy to play with, I spent a lot of time mucking about with the new laptop. Changing settings, installing programs I wanted, choosing a background...
Only to discover, with some disgust, that since I had absentmindedly left the wireless antenna turned off when I wiped windows, I now have no way to turn it back on. Pressing the dedicated antenna button doesn't change its status, nor does the button-press even rate a note in the system log. Doing it in the bios doesn't help. ACPI has never heard of it. It's like the wireless card doesn't exist.
The only way I can get it back is to demolish my carefully constructed linux install by restoring windows, allow it to load the wireless button driver, press the damned button, and then reinstall linux. Another day's worth of work, probably.*
Siiiiiigh.**
I've conducted a full backup of my linux system, in the hope that I can just pour the tarball onto a fresh installation and get all my hours of work restored. (I need to go make a note of the current partition table, too.)
Once I set the backup running, I guiltily went back to my paper. I have it half-done (the easy half), and I have a question out to the TA on what sources I can use for the other half. Once he answers, I'm pretty well positioned to polish it off in 3-4 hours of work, I think. Plus the icing (bibliography, budget, and timeline for the project). It's due on the 9th, so that's manageable. Then all I have is the lab report... and studying for finals. Urk.
Edit: I tried starving the machine (unplug it and take out the battery for about 10 min), but that didn't reset it; a trip to the bios took about 10 attempts (what I wanted was F9) and didn't have a setting for the antenna status, though I was able to increase the amount of time I have to press a function key before it starts the bootloader.
*Next to this, the fact that the system beep doesn't work is trivial.
**Hey, Alex, remember what you said about how things always seem to go wrong in ways that are tedious to fix?
Only to discover, with some disgust, that since I had absentmindedly left the wireless antenna turned off when I wiped windows, I now have no way to turn it back on. Pressing the dedicated antenna button doesn't change its status, nor does the button-press even rate a note in the system log. Doing it in the bios doesn't help. ACPI has never heard of it. It's like the wireless card doesn't exist.
The only way I can get it back is to demolish my carefully constructed linux install by restoring windows, allow it to load the wireless button driver, press the damned button, and then reinstall linux. Another day's worth of work, probably.*
Siiiiiigh.**
I've conducted a full backup of my linux system, in the hope that I can just pour the tarball onto a fresh installation and get all my hours of work restored. (I need to go make a note of the current partition table, too.)
Once I set the backup running, I guiltily went back to my paper. I have it half-done (the easy half), and I have a question out to the TA on what sources I can use for the other half. Once he answers, I'm pretty well positioned to polish it off in 3-4 hours of work, I think. Plus the icing (bibliography, budget, and timeline for the project). It's due on the 9th, so that's manageable. Then all I have is the lab report... and studying for finals. Urk.
Edit: I tried starving the machine (unplug it and take out the battery for about 10 min), but that didn't reset it; a trip to the bios took about 10 attempts (what I wanted was F9) and didn't have a setting for the antenna status, though I was able to increase the amount of time I have to press a function key before it starts the bootloader.
*Next to this, the fact that the system beep doesn't work is trivial.
**Hey, Alex, remember what you said about how things always seem to go wrong in ways that are tedious to fix?
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-31 17:26 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-09 00:05 (UTC)From what I'm reading, a hardware abstraction layer for this chipset doesn't exist yet anyway (Atheros doesn't bother; it's left up to a hobbyist), so I'm down to a few fairly slim possibilities. I could try the windows driver with NDISwrapper, which might work; there are a couple of utilities to handle things like hotkeys for specific laptops which also might work.
There is also the possibility of just replacing the chipset, which I'm leaning heavily toward. New, compatible mini-PCI/mini-PCIe cards can be obtained.
I'll be doing more hacking on it when I'm past finals. I have a half-completed installation notes page that I'll put up when I'm done documenting the current condition and possible solutions, and that'll note what I've tried and recommend. :/