Acer Aspire

Having identified an immediate need for more RAM, and appreciating 
there's limited value in purchasing SDRAM for a notebook I took the plunge.

I armed myself with the knowledge on how to get Windoes tell me the 
critical info re the wireless chipset and went to see the advertiser of 
the 3003WLWi. Those were not in stock, but the young chap in the shop 
suggested an Aspire 3503WLMI, and he fetched one from out the back, 
unpacked it, plugged in and watched me set it up enough to go into the 
wireless settings.

It's an Atheros AR5005 and after a little googling (and checking the U 
wikis which weren't very helpful) I decided it's probably okay. Besides, 
the 3003 was the best value I had found - 60 Gb, DVD burner and 512 Mb 
are the other critical factors, and when I eventually bought the 3503 it 
had been reduced $AU200 for being a runout, $50 because it was the last 
one and a demo, another %50 because they couldn't find all the packaging 
and the sleeves for the CDs were missing and I'd spent ages standing 
around looking lost. The end result was 20 Gb more disk, a Celery 
instead of a Sempron and a couple of dollars less.

Now I know why I need a Breezy live cd:-) Knoppix will have to do.

Here's where I nearly wet myself: the 80 Gb is partitioned. Two 
partitions, of equal size. Formatted FAT32!!

I thought FAT32 pretty much died with Windows ME.

The U Wikis for Wireless.
I suspect they've been created mostly by folk who've had gear a year or 
three. I didn't recognise any info about kit I found for sale. I suggest 
those on this list with info take steps to update info, and those with 
memberships of other Ulists remind folk there to contribute. I fully 
understand that once one's learned enough to accomplish a task, it's 
easy to forget to pass the experience on.

Certain cards are listed as working with ndiswrapper. It needs to me 
made abundantly clear that those cards are complete nogos for users on 
Power/PPC, *Sparc etc. One of the chaps in a store I went to actually 
knew enough to suggest ndiswrapper when I objected to the broadcom 
wireless card I found in of the laptops on offer.


I've booted the Knoppix 4 CD and had a look around. First time the card 
showed up but the system locked up when I tried iwconfig to associate 
with my AP,

I've looked around, not found any sure way forward atm. Judging from 
madwifi.org (who seem to have sorted out their web presence at last) it 
will probably work with their latest software.

Looking at Fedora Core 3 and RHEL-clone I see no support, which doesn't 
surprise me: RH is necessarily a bit conservative.

Knoppix has the drivers, I just don't know whether they're the latest. 
If so, prospects for a Quick Fix aren't good.

I've eyeballed a Breezy system and it seems to have the drivers too.

The wireless is unrecognised by lspci (hwadata? on Knoppix). Its PCI 
version is 168c:001a, subversion 1468:0418

Does anyone here have any info on this device?


Knoppix is also saying lots about ACPI - so much I can't see any other 
kernel messages.