I’ve got one of those delightful broadcom network chips in my PowerBook, which didn’t have Linux support for a long time. Thanks for nothing Broadcom, you bastards. All the thanks go to the guys who have spent long hours reverse engineering it, and developing a driver from scratch for it. Big ups.

This post is actually about how I got NetworkManager running on Gentoo with the bcm43xx. There are two patches to the ieee80211softmac package, which I needed to get it to work. The first is a patch which defaults the wireless to 11M, rather than 54M (as the driver doesn’t yet drop down the rate until it associates), and the second is a patch which makes softmac send the right signals out to alert the system when it has actually associated.

I have made an ebuild which incorporates these two patches, which you can grab from here. Just extract this to your own local portage overlay, and emerge ieee80211softmac-r20060329, to try it out.

You need to emerge dhcp, dhcdbd and NetworkManager from the Gentopia overlay, and make sure that you have the latest wpa_supplicant. I had to create the /var/run/wpa_supplicant directory every time I wanted to run NetworkManager, or it just wouldn’t work.

Good luck

Had a bit of a bash on Thursday night to show off Kerr-Unit, before dropping him off at the airport Friday morning.

It just won’t be the same not having him around to nag me about going to the gym, and now I won’t be able to hang shit on him about his gay brown jumper. Make sure you check out all the dodgy photos from the night in my gallery.

So, i’ve been working at VPAC for about two weeks now. It’s nice to be busy and doing stuff I enjoy.

When I first arrived, I was greeted by this robot made by Mike, from cardboard boxes and packing material from the cluster nodes that had recently been delivered. What I didn’t realise was that Mike was actually inside it. He preceeded to scare the shit out of me when I walked towards it, and it groaned and moved its arms at me.

Working back in the ‘Pit’ is nice too. It sorta feels like a fish tank, so I put some fish up on the window. Good times.