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Monthly Archives: October 2007

Fixing IPW2200 system hang with WEP 802.11

After installing an IPW2200 mini-pci 802.11g wireless card, my wife complained that her system would freeze for a minute while attempting to connect to an 802.11 (WEP) network for the first time. After the initial time-out and failure, wireless network connections would work fine until the computer was rebooted. 
As it turns out, I was experiencing [...]

3Com Bluetooth PCMCIA card (3CRWB6096) with Ubuntu

To get a Motorola Bluetooth wireless PC card (PCMCIA)  (version 2) working with Ubuntu linux, all I had to do was download the windows driver from Motorola and extract (using unzip) the Drivers.W2k/BT3CPCC.bin file to /lib/firmware/BT3CPCC.bin.
This card works correctly, but I am able to get faster transfer times using a USB bluetooth adapter (from [...]

Freeing my V3xx phone from Cingular

After getting ATT/Cingular to take the subsidy lock off my phone, I decided to flash it with the generic International Motorola firmware. The advantages:

The Motorola firmware is not "branded" and gets rid of all of the "Shop Cingular" links, menu items, etc.
The quadband firmware claims to support all 4 GSM bands (instead of the 3 [...]

3G is better than EDGE for me!

Some idiot makes the claim that EDGE is just fine and you don't need 3G for web-browsing. The author claims that pure bandwidth doesn't matter, and that latency is more important to the user experience (which I totally agree with) but then goes on to state that 3G has worse latency than EDGE, which is [...]

Moving encrypted partitions from Mandriva to Ubuntu

Red Hat based distros such as Mandriva use loop-aes and losetup that have some default options that are different from a debian based distribution such as Ubuntu which use dm-crypt. To mount my "old-school" encrypted volumes I had to use the loopaes script from Gary Larson. (I also had to install the hashalot package [...]

Unlocking my Cingular / AT&T phone

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US after your AT&T contract is finished, which is one reason AT&T and other carriers lock [...]

D-link DWL-G122 with WPA under Linux

The D-Link DWL-G122 USB 802.11g (revision B1) wifi adaptor works great for open or WEP encrypted networks and is supported by Ubuntu out of the box. Unfortunately, the open source driver doesn't support WPA2 (and only supports WPA via non-standard iwpriv settings, and even then, the support is flaky).
I was able to get it [...]