Getting Wireless Adaptor Working in Ubuntu 9.10 With RTL8192SE Linux driver

If you have a Toshiba laptop, theres a good chance it has a Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC or some minor variation of same. Realtek apparently doesn’t make it very easy to find drivers for linux for this card – the person who posted the driver said he got it from Realtek,m and I don’t have any real reason to doubt that. It works for me, in any case. Here are the steps I took to be able to use WiFi on my Toshiba Satellite P505. YMMV, so feel free to give a thorough read of the problem and solutions available at the Ubuntu help/bug forums. The driver tarball is availabloe to download from that thread. rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009.tar.gz (1.3 MiB, application/x-tar)

only load the driver module to kernel and start up nic.
1. Build up the drivers from the source code
make
2. Copy firmware to /lib/firmware/ or /lib/firmware/(KERNEL_VERSION)/
cp -rf firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware
or
cp -rf firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware/(KERNEL_VERSION)
Note: This depends on whether (KERNEL_VERSION) subdirectory exists under /lib/firmware

3. Load driver module to kernel and start up nic.
./wlan0up

And now back to writing.

Linux | No comment

Show Categories Without Header In Wordpress

It seems like using wp code snippets used to be more intuitive, from what I remember. I could be wrong. I wanted to show my blog categories in the sidebar, but I didn’t want to have an unstyled label so I could add my own, without having to add anything to the stylesheet. After some googling, here is the path to better category display for minimally styled blogs:

wp_list_categories(‘title_li=’); ?>

Makes sense I guess, but it was annoying trying to figure it out. RTFM Jeff, sheesh.

Development, Wordpress | No comment

My First And Only Wordpress Theme: Paperback Writer Theme

As I’m starting my writing blog off slowly, I wanted a nice, simple theme that didn’t do anything much at all. I had an idea to make kind of an old-school looking page, like a blog I would have done in about 98. I couldn’t find anything much to suit me at the Wordpress Theme Repository, so I decided to learn to make a WP theme, as despite several years of hacking themes and general WP tomfoolery, I had never sat down and tried to make a theme. The result: Paperback Writer Theme – my first and most likely last foray into making a Wordpress theme. Please note that if you want to use it, you will want to add a good deal of functionality – right now it is very bare boned.

Development, Projects | 1 comment

I… live… again!

Jeff Barr: The world’s best pulp writer of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction. OK, well, top 50 or so.

Writing | No comment