It was all working so very well. So well, in fact, I wrote a series of articles explaining to mere mortals how to get CentOS 5.3 running on their home PCs. Today, I was out at the library, popped in my wifi card, and the system locked up — no keyboard, no mouse clicks, etc. Okay. Let’s reboot and try again on the console. Step by step. I went through the manual process and it happened again. This time I caught what was doing it: ifconfig. It was taking off in a race condition, one that could not be killed by root on the command lie. That is so rare, it’s remarkable, in my experience.
I googled, but found no clues. I probably don’t know the right terms, but there seemed no bug reports, way to get around it. I’m guessing there is some flaw in the way the rtl8180 drive was backported into the RedHat kernel. I can’t have that. Lugging this thing around is pretty good exercise, but I had work to do. Sigh.
For now, I’ve reinstalled Etch. Just for grins, I chose the secret incantation at boot time to make sure the netinstall disk gave me KDE. It’s running pretty quick, and with the Backport kernel upgrade, the wifi works again. To make sure, I set it up and am using it to post this.
