[gentoo-laptop] Introduction & Inspiron 6400

[Will Briggs <will@burnieanglican.org.au>]

G'day all,

Having been a gentoo user for a number of years now I have recently
installed onto a Dell Inspiron 6400 and am now experiencing the
adrenalin rush of gettin wireless and other laptoppy things (fglrx for
the X1400 etc.) up and running.  So... my first post to gentoo-laptop.

I have now reached the point of the basics working, but coping with some
minor annoyances - those sort of things that usually take hours of
googling etc. resulting in a 30 second fix.  So having googled for hours
I'm wondering if people can give me the simple advice on the following:

1) The ksynaptics "syndock" applet tells me that "You need at least
driver version 0.14.4" but I have that:

emerge -pv synaptics...
[ebuild   R   ] x11-drivers/synaptics-0.14.5-r1  USE="-dlloader" 0 kB

Before I bugs.g.o this have I missed something obvious?

2) I'm having intermittent problems with the Intel Pro 3945ABG wireless.
 Under windows the connection to my access point is solid as a rock.
Under gentoo the network occassionally hangs - Restarting the card
sometimes fixes it, restarting the access point sometimes fixes it.  I'm
currently exploring to make sure that it is the wireless and not
something else (NFS or something else higher up) that is hanging.  An
interesting little quirk is that under windows the little "wifi" LED
light is on solid, under linux it's on sometimes solid, sometimes
quivering - might be indicative or something.  Interested in others
experience here though.

My set up for the wireless works but seems a little messy - I'm
wondering if people can reccomend improvements:

portage has ipw3945 ipw3945d ipw3945-ucode which provides the kernel
level stuff (and provides eth1 I guess).  ipw3945d is run at init.
net.eth1 is not in init but instead runs from ifplugd so that I don't
get hangs etc. on boot when I'm not at home.
/etc/conf.d/net sets eth1 to be dhcp and loads wpa_supplicant as a module
wpa_supplicant has ssid and keys and stuff in config and works - by the
time I login on console the network is up.
kwifimanager then runs when I get into KDE

Thoughts?

Next things to do are to work on cpu stepping, bluetooth,
hibernation/standby stuff and things like that. Ain't it fun?

Regards,

Will.
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