H0ek's Journal: Phunky Network Device State

Well, do I have a story to tell...

That USB 802.11 network device that I have been struggling with. You know. The one that I have been beating myself up over because I cannot get a simple device to work properly.

I managed to get the 2.4.18 kernel sources to build and installed. After I rebuilt the USB network drivers and installed, I gave the drivers a load. Voila! Network! I could now download security patches and whatnot. I'm so happy!

That is, until I reboot. I'm a little install-shy with this stupid network card, so to make sure I'm not completely stuffed, I reboot the machine and try the drivers again. By reboot, I mean shutdown the machine and turn it back on again. Well, for my troubles I got another kernel panic loading the network driver, and nothing seems to help.

So, it's almost working, but not quite...

As I was browsing the 1,000th webpage of information, I came across a little unknown line of text that says there might be problems building the driver with kernels older than 2.4.20. Since this is a desktop machine, I have been trying my hardest to stay on the Debian stable branch. Unfortunately, the Debian stable branch only has kernel versions up to 2.4.18. OK, I gave in, I upgraded to testing. Like magic, there's the 2.4.24 kernel (BTW, the 2.6.0 kernel made its way from unstable to testing. Seems the Debian folk are getting warmer to the idea of the new kernel). I install the image and source, build the source using the image config file, install the build and rebuild the USB network drivers. They load and work!

Well, that's a shock! So I try to reboot again. After everything comes up, I get another kernel panic. It's intermittant stuff like this that will end up killing me. But I've begun to notice something. Each time the driver works, I find that I recently booted to WinXP (I'm dual booting), then softboot back to Debian. If I coldboot, the driver panics the kernel. So, at this moment I suspect that the Linux Atmel drivers have a fit on an uninitialized USB adapter. Guess what, I'm going to play with it again tonight. This time, though, I will probably attempt to fix any driver bugs I find.

Damn me and my wont to write code!