Parsed Participle

After years of using laptops that I never actually owned (like my company issued T42, or the aging NEC La Vie that my landlady permanently loaned me), I finally have one that is really mine.

This is a ThinkPad X301 (see this ThinkWiki entry for non-biased specs). Probably not the sort of laptop you buy on a grad-student budget, but it was available for a discount at the University computer store.

Debian 'Lenny' is now happily running on it, no major problems in installation or configuration except:

• Wifi is non-free. I overlooked the fact that Intel wifi drivers need proprietary firmware blobs. It works but to depend on the non-free firmware is a shame. Customizing the laptop from Levovo directly may have yielded some free (albeit costlier) options. I wonder what other non-free devices I may encounter. I'm happy with whatever is working out-of-the-box, though.
• There is a stupid glitch that prevents me from using the TrackPad (unless I choose to sacrifice the wonderful TrackPoint scrolling feature famously associated with ThinkPads). This is a problem only for distributions that use fully HAL-automated hardware configuration; it is too late, however, to revert to hand-customized configuration files (xorg.conf, etc).
• Minor suspend/resume issues which I am sure will smoothen out soon.

During my initial days in Japan, I spent much of my time and money (both of which, owing to my job, were not exactly plentiful) shopping for hardware at Akihabara. In those days, hardware was a big part of my computing life. Today, I don't seem to care much about how fast my laptop/desktop or even PDA really is, much less bother with fiddling/tweaking individual components for the sake of it.

It turns out, programming is far more fun.

At least, I think so now. But back then, I was poor hardware-wise; and the desire had sort of evolved.
So, after a really long time, I found myself shopping for a Wifi card. I've always felt relieved that I've avoided messing around with Wifi. Relieved - in the sense that any decent new laptop usually has wifi working, and even a semi-careful Linux user will only buy laptops that have fully supported hardware. Anyway, it all began when I decided it would be nice to sit up in bed with my laptop (which incidentally, is an old NEC LaVie with a puny sub-gigahertz Duron processor, gifted to me by my previous landlady's partner), when I realized that I didn't have a long enough LAN cable. I then biked up to the nearest BIC Camera in Shibuya, 40 minutes before it's closing time, equipped with a very rough, barely legible scribbled list of names of Linux-supported Wifi chipsets. This is what I do whenever in doubt:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

... and then copy off the names of all the hardware listed under Wifi drivers. The expedient thing to do would have been (a) wait a day longer (b) read up about wifi (c) find some ways to map products names/models to chipsets!

But my old impatience with hardware-shopping came back and got me. (have I ever mentioned the time I purchased a 21-inch IIyama monitor on the spur of the moment while waiting for a friend at Akihabara?) So given just 20 minutes before closing time, and my list of chipsets I started scanning the available products on the wireless section of BIC Camera. Now there are several difficulties in doing something like this:

1. Everything is in Japanese. And I only read a small subset of the Language.
2. Every card says it works with Window Vista, XP and 'even' 2000. (nothing else)
3. The actual hardware that a certain product uses is usually not mentioned on the packaging; (Unless it's Intel or something) so even if I know that a certain Realtek-based card is likely to work, it's no good unless the packaging mentions that the card is based on a something-or-the-other Realtek chip. (there are exceptions: Graphics cards always have explicit chipset information, or at least, the marketing name-space is mappable to what's inside)

In the end, I just went with the only card which said "Powered by Atheros" - though it did not say which Atheros chip exactly, my cursory pre-shopping googling seemed to indicate that Atheros is well supported and the card ought to work on Linux.

('Atheros' also rang more than a bell; In at least one of my previous jobs, there was a project that involved the development of an Atheros driver. Needless to say, it wasn't a Free/Open-Source driver, and though I myself never worked on driver development, I actually remember integrating it (the kernel modules) into the base-system of some embedded router OS. Again, some product that we (our company) got paid for, but probably didn't go too far since it wasn't Free.)

Anyway, to return to the card - it turns out that it does work - all I had to do was recompile my kernel and build 'madwifi', which is the project that provides super-good support for all atheros-based wifi cards.
The only real painful part is that I'd forgotten how slow the old laptop was. Out of shear laziness I skipped the usual time-consuming process of pruning unwanted kernel features and drivers, and even after 3 hours the build hadn't completed!