Rated N

This is pretty much nerdy stuff – Tuesday night, I tried to install this network card I got from Fry's that has remote-power-on capability. That way, I can turn on my computer from a remote location (work) if I need to grab something. Anyhoo, it was a cheapie but good brand. Netgear FA312 for $25. I currently have another Netgear card in my server, so I thought there wouldn't be any problems with getting it to work in Linux.

So I go home and take out the old card (3Com 3c905b) and pop in the new one and boot up, expecting it to recognize the new card. It saw that the old card was gone, and it auto-uninstalled the modules for that, but it didn't see the Netgear. Hmmm... So I read the docs on the floppy that came with it and it turns out I need to recompile the kernel to get it working. So I obliged and did the whole kernel compile thing and rebooted. No go. It actually made it unbootable, so I had to revert to the default kernel config. Anyways, I ended up putting the 3Com back in and had to recompile the kernel to how it was before, but I learned a lot about modules, which came in handy yesterday...

Last night, I successfully installed lm_sensors, after tons of failed attempts since I first started using Linux. Lm_sensors is a program that can display realtime stats on your system – voltages, temperature, fan speeds, and other good stuff. I was able to figure out the errors I was getting before, and resolved those, because of messing around with modules the night before. It's like everything clicked and made sense all of a sudden. Anyways, it's all installed now. I'm also going to post a message to linux.com regarding the installation tweaks I had to do to get it working, since the docs were a little unclear in some parts...