So, I upgraded the kernel on my laptop (Gentoo) to 2.6.25-gentoo-r7, thinking the suspend-to-ram might start working (broke in 2.6.24-gentoo-r8).  Big mistake.  Here's what broke:

Wireless

The Atheros AR5212 is supported in the new ath5k driver built into the kernel.  Unfortunately, it doesn't work correctly.  I switched wpa_supplicant to use the wext driver instead of madwifi, and after a couple worrying ioctl error messages DHCP ended up succeeding and I was apparently online.  iwconfig said I was stuck at a bitrate of 1Mbit/sec, though, and I was getting heavy (30%+) packet-loss.  No amount of fooling with the settings fixed this.

I tried to go back to the madwifi drivers, so I emerge'ed madwifi-ng again.  After changing wpa_supplicant back to use the madwifi driver, I started up net.ath0.  Yep, system hard-locked.  The kernel was still alive, but I couldn't get anything useful out of the memory or task information provided by hitting some SysRq keys.

Bad.

fglrx

Yes, ATI sucks, and fglrx is a horrible non-free piece of junk.  However, it's the only thing that will give me fast video on the Mobile Radeon 9600 video controller in the IBM T42.

The module built fine (from the ati-drivers ebuild), but wouldn't load due to the init_mm symbol being gone from the kernel.  It didn't look like I forgot to enable any deprecated options in menuconfig.  I guess the Gentoo developers just didn't include a patch to make this work.

Yep, fail.

Debian, here I come

I just got fed up with waiting for my laptop to recompile everything, too, so I installed Debian, and within an hour or two, am already up and running with 2.6.25, the madwifi drivers, and fglrx.

Since it's been a little bit since I've configured Xorg on a Debian system, I was a little surprised to see that dpkg-reconfigure -plow xserver-xorg produced a completely plain xorg.conf.  It only asked me about my keyboard, nothing about the video card drivers or monitor specifications.  I didn't really care about that (Xorg is moving to a hotplug/dynamic-type of system, anyway), but it kept trying to use the old radeon driver that didn't provide 3D or quick video.

I used module-assistant to build the fglrx drivers (the binary ones didn't work), and then ran:

# aticonfig --ovt Xv --initial -i /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Presto, working xorg.conf.  No tweaking/hacking needed.  However, any subsequent reinstalls of xserver-xorg will probably revert the xorg.conf back to the blank state.  Not a big deal.

The ath5k driver that came with Debian's 2.6.25 (2.6.25-2-686) kernel image didn't work, either.  Same packet-loss problem, but this time it at least tried to run at 24Mbit/sec (I'm not that close to the AP).  So, I just used module-assistant to build the madwifi drivers and created some custom debs.  Surprisingly, udev did the right thing, and loaded ath_pci instead of ath5k.  Works fine!

So, two more Gentoo systems need converting: my work laptop (Lenovo T60) and desktop at home.

Oh yeah, I also turned 27 today.  Bleh.

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