klog

…doesn’t work properly (at least on my laptop, using a GeForce 7000M). the reason for this is that Fedora 9 uses the latest version of xorg and NVidia’s driver does not yet work with it (3D is not fully working).

To get stuff at least minimally working, you need to downgrade your xorg RPMs to the Fedora 8 versions.

Unfortunately, KDE4 appears to require fully working GLX in order to display the kicker (or whatever the hell they’re calling it now), so my KDE is slightly crippled at the moment. A pity, really, as KDE4 is beautiful and almost as usable as 3.5 was.

My old laptop, an Acer Travelmate 2420 (good machine) started developing vertical lines on its TFT over the last few weeks, so I thought it was time to upgrade, and eventually fix the old lappie up for my son.

I bought an HP G6000. Ken Guest recommended a Lenovo x300 (or something like that) - I was in a bit of a rush, though - I can’t stand being without a functional machine, so I headed into Gillanders in Monaghan and bought the HP.

I spent a few hours on Friday dual-booting Linux onto the machine. FC7 initially, as that’s all I had with me, then upgraded to FC8 as soon as possible.

It wasn’t until I got home until I realised that the WIFI was broken (my office network is mostly wire-networked).

A few hours of study showed there was no simple solution to this. lspci claimed that the card is an AR5006EG from Atheros. the card is actually an AR5007EG. Either way, there is no “official” Linux support for this, and the unoffical support is not perfect either.

After reviewing the available information, I thought the easiest solution was to replace the WIFI car.d. I had an old Sony Vaio upstairs, so I pulled out the WIFI card from that, an Intel 3945abg, and placed that in the machine (if you unscrew the RAM plate at the back, you will see the WIFI card in its Mini-PCI-Express slot - lever the aerials off it and replace the card - simple, innit). unfortunately, that was far from perfect - the Intel 3945abg is not even seen by lspci - some hints I found online suggested that the 3945 doesn’t adhere to the standards.

Long story (asked Trevor in Gillanders for permission to dig through their laptop graveyard for a WIFI replacement - found nothing. tried some machines I had in the office - nothing found) - eventually, I figured out the solution.

Here’s the trick. You will not get the AR5007EG working in 64-bit Linux. Instead, you need to compile a custom kernel using the 386 mode, and download the patched version of MadWifi to compile the kernel module.

After that, everything’s simple. To fix the xorg - download the official NVidia driver module installer and let it compile a kernel module for you. That’s it - done.

Sorry for the length of this - I tried to throw in all the keywords that I searched for while trying to solve this.

Fedora does not come with the kqemu kernel module installed. You need to either compile it yourself, or download an RPM of it from somewhere. I use ATrpms myself.

When you try to install it, with the line “modprobe kqemu“, you might get this error:

FATAL: Error inserting kqemu (/lib/modules/2.6.24.3-34.fc8/updates/kernel/kqemu.ko): Invalid module format

All you need to do to fix this is to open the kqemu.ko file with Vim (or a lesser text editor if you will), and replace the string ‘586′ with ‘686′ then save and retry.