Kernel upgrade to 2.6.22.16-0.1 and minor MadWifi inconvenience

The opensuse updater applet upgraded my kernel and the nvidia graphic card drivers on my opensuse 10.3. Everything was ok except Wifi stopped working.

I have a T61 with the Atheros chipset using MadWifi. It seems the MadWifi repositories haven't caught up. Luckily you can search for updated MadWifi rpms from software.opensuse.org/search.

So first things first is to check what my new kernel is ....

uname -r

Next I search for madwifi-kmp-default that matches the kernel I'm using on http://software.opensuse.org/search and I click on the "One click install" icon to install it.

My sister's EEE-PC

Lucky my sister has small fingers. I can't imagine myself using this thing for work. The keys on the keyboard are so small and the screen though bright and clear is just too small. I guess that's the adjective that best describes this machine. It's small but it's just fine for my sister who happens to be just as petite ;-)

The unit is the PC-701 model equipped with a 1.3 megapixel webcam, 1GB memory and a 4 GB solid state hard disk with Xandros Linux pre-installed.

Three days before purchase I called to ask if there were available units. The sales person I spoke with said they had 75 units available but he added that these things were selling like hotcakes. When we finally dragged ourselves to the store, there were only 3 units left, he wasn't kidding !!!

I had a chance to play with it for about an hour and here are my first impressions.

• Boot up is fast. No doubt, due to the solid state hard disk. It beat my T61 to the login screen.
• The posters and flyers say its "Shock Proof - Weather Proof - Best in Class !". I'm inclined to agree, it feels solid and it's light. It feels like you can actually throw it around without worry.
  
• It's linux of course, so the apps were all familiar linux apps like Pidgin, OpenOffice and Firefox, nothing any linux user hasn't seen.
  
• Applications were quite responsive. Skype worked out of the box with the webcam.
  
• There's a voice command app but I didn't get a chance to try it out yet.

Here are a couple of photos from my camera phone. The last two shots give you a feeling of how exactly small it is.

ExtJS 2.0.1 is out

Everybody start your download managers and get ExtJS 2.0.1 from ExtJS.com

http://extjs.com/download

Looks like I'll be busy updating projects today ....

Can I have your name sir ?

When I go order my favorite venti coffee jelly frapuccino from our local Starbucks, the barista always asks if I want a ham sandwich to go with it, I wonder why ?