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

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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.

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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.

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