[buug] Solano Stroll Booth

[Ian Zimmerman]

>>>>> "Zeke" == Pewter Bot <pewterbot9 at gmail.com> writes:

Zeke> Jack DeSlippe posted: {{ Come check out our linux booth 1174
Zeke> Solano ave all day today. }}

Zeke> Glad the weather cooled off, else I wouldn't have even dreamt of
Zeke> showing up (I'm a cold weather kinda kind, and don't care if I
Zeke> never see the sun again). As it turned out, I had an excellent
Zeke> day. Thanks, Michael, for recommending that bicycle path from
Zeke> North Berkeley BART, it was fantastic, and I learned, has a name:
Zeke> "Ohlone Green Way". Would love to live in one of those cottages or
Zeke> apartments with back yard facing the path, how idyllic! I will
Zeke> make a point of frequenting that bicycle path, and ride it further
Zeke> than I did today.

When I was a poor student (and then, an unemployed programmer), I used
to walk the entire length of the greenway from El Cerrito Plaza to
downtown Berkeley.  The BART trains got noisier since then, though.

Zeke> Yay, that's the cherry on the cupcake of my day. So I lingered
Zeke> over a tall glass of iced tea, and enjoyed the public wifi. Only
Zeke> there's a hitch: apparantly, they using one of those routers that
Zeke> doesn't work so well with my Asus netbook's atheros
Zeke> chipset. Further exploration has pointed the culprit to be the
Zeke> lower cost routers, such as NetGear.  Until recently, I was able
Zeke> to get around this, by disabling the internal wifi, and using
Zeke> instead an external USB wifi that is not an Atheros. But this
Zeke> doesn't work now, since I upgraded Eeebuntu from 2.0 to 3.0.

Disabling the internal wifi interface on any Linux system should be easy,
even if there's no GUI for it.  That's what I do with my bastardized
thinkpad.  Find out the name of the driver, I'm going to assume it is
a5k.ko for the sake of example.  Then, as root, do this shell command:

echo 'blacklist a5k' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local

Reboot, and voila, that stupid atheros interface is as good as dead.

-- 
Ian Zimmerman <itz at buug.org>
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Ham is for reading, not for eating.