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I recently upgraded my laptop’s installation of Ubuntu Feisty to Ubuntu Gutsy, and as usual everything worked out of the box. Except my wireless drivers.

The linux restricted drivers package that comes with Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) contains the 0.9.18.0 version of the proprietary hal. While this works with most wireless cards using Atheros chips, it doesnt really work for mine. My Toshiba Tecra TE2300 contains an Atheros AR5211 chip (as listed by dmesg) on an internal mini-pci card, and although the driver is loaded correctly for the wireless card, it refuses to associate and also just stays on the 5 GHz frequency no matter what I do.

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Sometimes you just want to have more power than the average GNU/Linux distribution puts in your hands. Ordering the entire Debian Etch DVD collection is taking longer than I thought, so I opted to build my Linux using my own chosen collection of software. After some thorough searching, I came upon the site Linux from Scratch, which gives instructions on building your own ddistribution. There is a sort of twist, in that you need an existing,functional installation of Linux to build linux! In my case, i had Ubuntu on my laptop a Toshiba Tecra TE2300 (I have not found a single review on this laptop on the internet, not even a simple spec list! That is a topic for another article…). Miraculously, all the hardware on my laptop is detected and working. The only problem i have is, downloading build-essential package with an inconsistent network/internet connection had been frustrating: sometimes the dependent packages would install, and an attempt to compile would tell me crt1.o could not be found.Fortunately the LFS (Linux From Scratch) team provides a functional LiveCD, which you can use to begin your foray in to the wild, wild, world of Linux software compilation.

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