Now, I’m upgrading to kernel 2.6.29, and there have been some changes to the kernel configuration for the iwl4965 driver. CONFIG_IWL4965 is now a suboption of CONFIG_IWLAGN. The wireless didn’t work on the first boot however. eth0 didn’t work either. But, when I changed the wired driver from “Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet” (CONFIG_E1000) to the same for PCI-express (CONFIG_E1000E), it did work on the next boot and the wireless magically started working too.

I was surprised because I don’t see what the wired and the wireless driver have got to do with each other. Also, before, I’ve always successfully used the non-PCI-express driver for my wired Ethernet interface and I’m so old fashioned that I can’t imagine either way that my hardware uses something so modern as PCI-express.

Anyway, it works now. I’ve gone from kernel 2.6.25 to 2.6.29 and everything seems to be working. I still have to find out how to get Monitor mode working though.

One final thing I noticed is that upgrading net-wireless/iwl4965-ucode created an extra entry in my world profile: net-wireless/iwl4965-ucode:0. I wonder what that is for.

One of the joys of once more owning a personal computer is that I don’t have to live through PuTTY anymore. (I used to SSH to the local Debian server here if I wanted to get anything done.) I’ve reacquainted myself with Gentoo and I’m loving it. Of course, there’s a lot more to configure than with Ubuntu (which supports the T61 very neatly out of the box), but that’s the whole point; I want to be able to configure everything my way and I want to update my knowledge about how Linux systems are made up these days. Control.

On the topic of control, the Control key on the Lenovo keyboard, as with many laptop keyboards that I’ve encountered, is in a bit of an awkward position, squeezed to the right by the Function key. Since, I very much depend on the Control key for shortcuts (in just about anything, but especially in libreadline-based programs), I decided to change the Caps Lock key to be an extra Control key. I’ve never actually used the CapsLock key in my life, I probably never will, older keyboards used that very spot for the Control Key, and why not? It’s a much better spot, requiring less gymnastics for my little pinky to reach. Once I considered this I was actually puzzled about why I’ve always wasted such an well-accessible key position.

X

On to the configuration. I wanted this to work in both Console mode and in X. But first X. In the xorg.conf, I went to the InputDevice section for my keyboard and added ctrl:nocaps to XkbOptions. The full XkbOptions line now reads:

Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps,altwin:menu,compose:ralt,eurosign:e"

That’s it. I had to take a few more steps to get it to work in the console also.

Console

First, I created a file called “/etc/extra-key-conf” with the following contents:

keymaps 0-15
keycode 58 = Control

Then I added the following to /etc/conf.d/local.start. This is a Gentoo specific script that is loaded by /etc/init.d/local.

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" -a -e /etc/extra-key-conf ]; then
        loadkeys /etc/extra-key-conf &>/dev/null
fi

What this does is to check if the $DISPLAY variable isn’t set (of which we can be sure in this context, but may be useful if you plan to copy this snippet). It also checks if /etc/extra-key-conf exists. If both conditions are satisfied, loadkeys is called with that file as its argument.

In conclusion

I can really recommend this configuration even if your Control key is not awkwardly positioned on your keyboard. Do you use your Caps Lock key? Regularly? If you don’t, this will make your keyboard use more effective.

Reference

If you want to read into this more extensively, I recommend the Remap Caps Lock article from the Portland Pattern Repository.]]> http://blog.bigsmoke.us/2008/07/15/using-caps-lock-as-an-extra-control-key/feed 2 http://blog.bigsmoke.us/2008/07/14/my-cd-rw-drive-can-read-everything-it-writes http://blog.bigsmoke.us/2008/07/14/my-cd-rw-drive-can-read-everything-it-writes#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:10:50 +0000 Rowan Rodrik http://blog.bigsmoke.us/?p=97 The HL-DT-ST CD-RW/DVD drive in my Lenovo T61 laptop, has a certain peculiarity. I was burning an ISO image, wich exceeded the supported size of a standard 80 minute CD by 7 MB. (The image was 707 MB.) Using cdrecord with the -overburn option seemed to work, until I tried to mount the CD-ROM. It would inevitably—

# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom -t iso9660
mount: block device /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only

Well, that is unexpected! I was going to write that it would refuse with some errors in dmesg about trying to access data beyond some boundary. But I probably messed up something very trivial, because I just can’t seem to reproduce the error in any way as the mount result above shows.

Let’s backtrack everything I did to try to fix this problem.

First, after numerous attempts to mount the 700 MB sized CD, I gave up and asked my little sister to bring me my stack of 800 MB CDs next time she’d come. Of course, over a week went by without her remembering to take the CDs. But eventually, I picked them up myself.

Having retrieved the 800 meg CDs, it came time to test them. Burning went well. Then mounting… A failure with dmesg showing the familiar error (which I now can’t look up because I can’t reproduce the problem ). Mounting it in the local server’s drive worked fine, though, leading me to think that my burner can’t read CD-ROMs it has written with overburn enabled.

Luckily, I was wrong. But I really don’t understand why I did get the errors at first. Sure, I did notice a faulty entry in my fstab, but I had also tried mounting it without relying on the fstab (i.e., with mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom), which begot me the same error… Also, I had mounted plenty of CDs before this adventure.

All I can do to explain this is to concede that this is one of those problems where you usually call a geek friend telling them you can’t get something to work. They’ll reply by asking you have you tried this and that? Of course I have, at least twice, in the exact same sequence as you describe! Well, humour me then, and try it once more… Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! And why didn’t it work 10 minutes ago?! Don’t tell me you’ve never had this happen to you. Please?

In conclusion, after finding out that the 800 MB CD did work on my laptop, I reclaimed the 700 MB CD as well (which was now serving as a hawk-deflector in the coop) to find out that, even after being exposed to lots of rain and sun for over a week, this CD also mounted without hesitation.