YMMFI

So I’ve been playing with Moblin which is a niche Linux distro from Intel that is geared towards Netbooks. I was finally able to get the 2.0 final release to boot on my Sony Vaio Laptop (the only time I have been happy that I have an Intel graphics accelerator). Unfortunately it’s pretty buggy but the issue isn’t an issue with Moblin itself but with the ath5k module used for the Atheros Wifi Radio that’s built into this laptop. It’s not just ath5k AFAIK as wpa_supplicant seems to have a role in it too. The laptop will boot and run but when it attempts to associate with my AP (an ancient Linksys 54G that until last night was running the 54GL firmware) it receive the keys and associate then the machine locks up. I can’t see to get to another X session or drop to a shell or re-start X at all but it’s not a hard lock as I can use ctrl+alt+delete to force it to reboot. Since it’s not getting far enough to get an IP address I can’t ssh into it to see what, if anything is showing up in the logs. As mentioned earlier though it’s not an issue specifically with Moblin as using Fedora 10/11 this same laptop will continually drop it’s association with the AP and I never took the time to troubleshoot it since it didn’t cause a lock up. I just had to reboot the machine and it would work again fine for a day or two.

I have tried the 2.1 dev images and it seems to be a little better (newer kernel) but I have read via Google searches that there appears to be some regression with ath5k. Also, if it doesn’t lock prior to getting fully into the desktop and grab a shell session, I can turn of wpa_supplicant via /etc/rc.d/init.d/wpa_supplicant stop and just use the wireless tools package [iwconfig] as well as ifconfig to get a working network connection and it seems to work fine without locking nearly as often as when using wpa_supplicant.  I tried to roll my own custom kernel using the vanilla sources from kernel.org and a branch of the Mad Wifi modules from www.madwifi-project.org but for some reason X barfs when I boot that kernel. It also isn’t really a proper work around since it violates the spirit of the Moblin Project as this branch not only taints the kernel it violates the “if it’s not in Linus’ kernel then it can’t be submitted as a patch) rule I was reading in the dev docs.

Stay tuned for more updates as I continuing fiddling.