Tardis is a Dell Inspiron 5000. 733Mhz Inspiron Speedstep, 15" screen running 1400x1050, 18Gb disk, 8x DVD rom. I deleted the internal (Win) modem and run a Linksys 10/100/56k card.
This combination runs RedHat 6.2 like a charm, including suspend/resume an suspend to disk. I've heard of problems using the Xircom card that Dell sells.
You'd think that journalling filesystem and a laptop would be the perfect mairrage. However commits are driven by either a timer expiry or by the journal getting too full. Unfortunately, the designers seem to have confused consistency with timelyness, and have set this timer to 5 seconds, which hoses any chance of spinning down the disks.
The first thing you must do is mount all filesystems with the noatime option, to minimize changes.
Secondly, edit fs/jbd/journal.c and change the commit timer to a large interval (grep for "HZ")
I've added orinoco wireless to my laptop for buming around the house and USENIX conferences.
Mike Levitt wrote:
The only client cards out there with extermal antenna connectors are Lucent Orinoco, Cisco, and BreezeCom. You would need to talk to the company directly about any antennae connections, though I know Orinoco uses MMCX.
Regarding access points, you can get Cisco 340 series APs with antenna connectors. The connection type is Reverse-polarity TNC (RP-TNC) which means that the male connector contains a female pin arrangement, and vice-versa. This is because the companies producing WLAN equipment want to "discourage" amateur antenna setups. Anyway, Linksys products (WAP11 and BEFW11S4, NOT the BEFW11P1) also use the RP-TNC type. The Intel PRO/2011 WLAN access point, along with the Lucent AP-500 and AP-1000, use BNC connectors for external antennae. The Orinoco RG-1000 gateway is actually just a mounted PC card, so you could attach an antenna to it using MMCX cable. And, as previously mentioned, the Buffalo tech Airstation has an optional external antenna.
The other problem with WLAN right now is the expense of name brand antennae. Luckily, generic 2.4GHz broadband antennae have been available for years as regular radio equipment. Most have a N-female connector, requiring any cable from the access point to terminate in N-male. Your best bet on finding cheap external antennae are http://www.hyperlinktech.com and especially http://www.antennasystems.com (the latter will even custom make cheap antenna cabling for you, and terminate it however you wish).
So, if you're using a Linksys WAP11 and want to extend range, you will need a generic antenna (an 8dB "comtelco" omnidirectional from antennasystems.com is $81) plus the correct cable (low-loss LMR terminated at one end with N-Male and at the other with RP-TNC male, which costs ~$25 for 6ft, and slightly more per extra foot). Much cheaper than the Cisco solution, where cable costs you $80 and 5.2dB omni is $175.