[CoLoCo] iMac wifi / HD question

[Jim Hutchinson]

Hey all,

As some of you may know one of my Ubuntu computers is an iMac and I've had
some issues with it in the past with respect to wifi and hard disk. I did a
clean install of Hardy a while back and these issues are returning. It was
suggested in the past that it may be hardware related but I don't think it's
a problem with the hardware (as in broken hardware) but maybe how macs are
build or something and how they handle Linux. Anyway, if anyone has any
insight I'd appreciate hearing it.

The wifi issue is that it simply drops the connection after a while.
ifconfig will show that there isn't an IP when there must have been before
because all was working fine. The only fix that I have found is rebooting or
running sudo killall NetworkManager and then sudo NetworkManager. The odd
thing is that NM will still show signal strength bars and if you disconnect
and reconnect it will act like it does but still not get an IP. One though
is that NM is just crashing but if so I would think that I would not be able
to connect to a different network or reconnect but it will. That doesn't
seem how a program would act if it's crashed. I did have to use ndiswrapper
for the driver to work and it's the same process everyone else uses when
putting Ubuntu on a mac. I didn't do anything special other than that to get
it to work.

The other issue is the hard drive. In three years of running Ubuntu on
several computers I've never had fsck auto run at boot, fail and then drop
to a shell except twice now on the iMac. I have to manually run fsck and it
will fix a bunch of errors (inode something or other I think - I know I
should have written them down). I find it odd that this is the only computer
to ever exhibit this problem. One thought is that I don't have OSX running
on it and from what I can gather macs need their mommy. It takes a long time
to boot because it can't find an OSX partition and then times out and boots
what it can find. I did some reserach and found something called rEFIt, I
think. It is a boot loader for EFI based computers which I don't really
understand but apparently a mac is one. Could this be at all related to
either problem? If not, any ideas what's going on, why and how to fix?

Thanks.

-- 
Jim (Ubuntu geek extraordinaire)
----
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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