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February 26, 2006

Suse 10 and the new work laptop

I spent this weekend configuring my new work laptop to run Suse 10. I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before now, but the vast majority of the machines that will be at PFS will be running Linux. This includes the desktop computers that normal office users will be using. I figured that it doesn't make sense for me to have a laptop running Windows XP while everyone else was running Linux.

Here's the configuration of the laptop:

Toshiba M45-S2693
- Intel Centrino Pentium M 740
- 1024MB DDR2 RAM
- 100GB Hard Drive
- DVD+/-RW burner
- 15.4 WXGA display
- 802.11g wireless

Now, Suse 10 is one of the more recent distributions available on the market. In past installations, I've been very impressed with its ability to find hardware and configure it "out of the box". The same holds true for this installation as well. Everything was found on the laptop immediately on installation. There was a hangup, however.

This laptop uses the Intel Pro Wireless card for wireless access. The good news is that Intel has developed a module for this specific piece of hardware and it's available as a part of Suse 10. The downside is that the Linux kernel that ships with Suse 10 (2.6.13) has a bug in it regarding the ieee80211 module. As a result, it's required to uninstall the ipw2200 module that ships with Suse and download the updated modules from the Intel site on SourceForge. By downloading the ieee80211 and ipw2200 modules and the ipw2200 firmware and following the instructions for installation, it's very simple to get the wireless installed. This issue is fixed in the 2.6.14 version of the kernel, as the module is now part of the default Linux kernel.

On the installation of the ieee80211 module, I ran into a problem when trying to run make. This was due to the bug that I mentioned previously. In the kernel source, there is a file called ieee80211.h that needs to be deleted/moved/renamed. On my machine, it was located in the following directory:

/usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15/include/net/ieee80211.h

Once I renamed this file to ieee80211.bak, I was able to run make and make install on the downloaded ieee80211 module and it installed without any issues what-so-ever.

The second problem that I came across was with the built-in Ethernet, which uses the Marvell Yukon chipset. I discovered that the module that is included in the Linux kernel also has problems. This was an easy fix, as it also required a simple module download and installation as well.

After two module updates, my networking was working without any major issues. Additionally, this post was written from the laptop ... wirelessly ... from my couch at home.

~out...

Posted by ed at February 26, 2006 08:41 PM

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