Linux and APM and ACPI and my Thinkpad and …

My primary computer is my IBM T20 thinkpad, running Debian unstable. It’s hooked up to the rest of my home network through a wireless connection. Last week, every thing went south.

First, because my wife has been having a lot of trouble getting a good connection to the wireless network from her computer, I upgraded the access port (after futzing around with antennas for a day or so). I put in a new Linksys WAP. One of the cool ones, with Linux inside.

And, I took the opportunity to get a 802.11g PCMCIA card for my laptop.

First mistake.

No Drivers.

I ended up building ndiswrapper against 2.6.8.1, and using the Windows driver. I’m not thrilled about that, but I do like the increased bandwidth to the real computers upstairs.

Then, I did a apt-get dist-upgrade. And got upgraded to kernel 2.6.8.1-3.

Which won’t suspend properly.

The magick keys don’t even register, much less do anything. Turns out I’m not the first person to have this problem, so, I have some hope it will get fixed.

I took a stab at upgrading my BIOS to the most recent cut, hoping ACPI would work. It did a little bit, as long as I disabled X DPMS, and was willing to suspend only once before rebooting.

I usually leave the laptop running for weeks.

So I down graded back to 2.6.7.

And realized that I don’t have support for the new network card there.

Windows 2000, on an identical laptop, had been up for 253 days, before I rebooted it to pull the floppy drive to do the BIOS upgrade on this machine.

I suppose that’s what I get for running unstable.

What’s worse? It’s been _fun_.

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