On Notebooks 

We've tried to make it more suitable for notebooks with support for WiFi, Bluetooth, battery meter and much more

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

While aggregating packages for notebook users, the first question, which came in our mind, was, what are the real needs for a notebook user and the answer turned out to be Connectivity. Here we'll talk about configuring WiFi and Bluetooth in PCQLinux 2005, followed by configuring various other things such as the battery meter, mounting a USB flash drive, etc.

Configuring WiFi
Linux has become quite mature in the field of wireless networking. We have a huge list of cards and chipsets supported in the latest kernel and quite a few tools to use and manage them like iwtools, Kwifimanager and yes Centrino's WiFi card support. These all are here in PCQLinux 2005. Which means to configure a wifi card in PCQLinux 2005 you have to just plug it in and restart. You can manage this connection and devices by either running system-config-network or kwifimanager. You can find the list of supported chipsets from "http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/"

PCQLinux running on a wireless notebook. Notice the Stock ticker and Battery Monitor at the bottom panel and the WiFi meter on the top panel

Centrino notebooks with 802.11g WiFi cards
The kernel version with which PCQLinux (2.6.10) ships, has inbuilt modules for Centrino based wifi cards namely Intel wireless 2100b and 2200g but the firmware for 2200g card is not ship with the distro because of some last minute technical issues. So if you own a Centrino laptop with 2200g chipset then you have two download an rpm from 'ftp://rpmfind.net/Linux/freshrpms/fedora/Linux/3/ipw2200-firmware/ipw2200-firmware-2.2-1.1.fc3.fr.noarch.rpm' and install it. The good news is that all the Centrinos with ipw2100b chipset is supported out of the box. But yes you have to manually select the firmware package while installing PCQLinux 2005. You can find it in the PCQLinux Specials > Drivers section in the Package Selection screen of Installation.

Bluetooth PCQLinux 2005
In PCQLinux every component which is required for Bluetooth is already installed. You have to just insert your Bluetooth device into the system and restart your machine. Then run the following command.

#hciconfig hcix up

Here, replace 'x' with the number of Bluetooth devices minus one. So if you have just one device then the command should look like 'hciconfig hci0 up'. Now, run the hciconfig command without any parameters to see the type (USB/PCMCIA) and MAC address of your Bluetooth device(s). 

Now check whether or not the Bluetooth demon is working by running the command /etc/init.d/Bluetooth status.

GNOME Bluetooth Manager can not only detect all your bluetooth devices available in your vicinity, but also can catagorize them

If it's not running, then issue the command:

"/etc/init.d/Bluetooth start" 

You are now all set to connect to other Bluetooth devices. For this, simply run the command:

#gnome-Bluetooth-manager

And a pop-up box will open. Here select the 'Devices' menu and click on the scan button and it will search for all the available Bluetooth devices present in your vicinity. And you are done. To access gprs over the Bluetooth connection read the article called 'Net Access with Bluetooth and GPRS' in the may 2004 issue of PCQuest or read it online from http://www.pcquest.com/content/linux/2004/104050807.asp

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