Built-in 802.11 Wireless

There are some incarnations of this laptop that feature an integrated IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet connection. It's connected to the system through a USB interface, and is supposed to have two antennas integrated in the LCD case, which should give it quite a range.

These are supported by the ``Linux-wlan'' project, at http://www.linux-wlan.org/; you'll want the ``linux-wlan-ng'' flavour.

Unfortunately, the drivers aren't very stable yet, and only work with a vanilla kernel. If you apply the ACPI patches, you'll have two possibilities: when you try to load the modules under X modprobe will segfault(!), and the relevant module gets stuck in an ``initializing'' state. When trying from console, the result is a kernel panic.

Without the ACPI patches, however, it seems to work. I think that's only a minor inconvenience, since the extra features the ACPI patches give you are most interesting when you're on the road, where it's likely you won't have any wireless network in the neighbourhood anyway. That doesn't mean it isn't inconvenient, but it makes it a bit less of a headache.

What's more of a problem, is that the drivers can't seem to handle a sustained high data transfer rate very well. If I try to throw a lot of data through it, my keyboard-interrupt gets lost somewhere, and the wireless link is dropped as well. Which is bad, because it doesn't come up again.

Also, the drivers don't work with 2.6 (yet, I presume), so going that road won't help either.