2.6.12 Kernel woes

I spent whole weekend trying to figure out problem with my ethernet card and 2.6.12 Linux kernel.

My card worked with 2.6.11. But dmesg always showed receiver/transmission errors from the kernel. When I upgraded to 2.6.12, my card would get detected but it could not get IP address from my wireless access point.

Uh!! that was frustrating. I went to Google,kernel IRC room, kernel mailing list, Mandriva mailing list. I got no answers.

Ultimately, I decided to fix it on my own. After several hours of hacking, I found that I was loading wrong driver for my ethernet card. Davicom based ethernet card used tulip driver in kernel versions prior to 2.6.11. Certain updates in tulip drivers were not compatible with davicom chipsets. Hence I had to use native driver for davicom chipsets (which I never knew exists).

Only one word change in /etc/modprobe.conf file fixed the problem.

Now my Linux machine is back up again boasting in its usual pride.

MSN Virtual Earth messes up !

There was article on Slashdot pointing Microsoft visual earth service (similar to google earth) messing up on Apple Campus in Cupertino (SF Bay Area).

Here is the Microsoft version and here is the google version of the same.

Also some user on slashdot pointed out that visual earth still shows NY Twin Towers. Check out here

It seems that Microsoft is using old images and didn't care to update due to lack of competition. But now with Google in the field, it will be required to update these images.

This is similar to Internet Explorer saga. Microsoft decided to update Internet Explorer (will be in version 7 soon) only when Mozilla Firefox was gaining market share.

Anyways, this was an interesting find !

Who cares !

Indian PM,Dr. Manmohan Singh visited US. There is no news about it on www.cnn.com or San Jose Mercury News. This is really sad !.

My First Car

I can never forget 5th July 2005. I got my first car yesterday - 2005 Honda Civic LX.
I am very much excited !!.

Also I am planning to kick start a volunteer project. It will either be IRC Proxy or file system like interface for GMAIL. I don't know any details about any of the above, but will start researching and working as soon as I move to Santa Clara.

I love UNIX systems programming and I am confident to come up with a usefull FOSS sotware. Lets see how it goes ....