So sweet. Rob [1] lent me his Cisco Airo 340 (a wireless PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) network card) since he's not really using it right now; he was using it at work but they shut down the wireless network there.
I pulled down the latest version of the PCMCIA Linux drivers [2] and started compiling. When loading the Airo module it kept complaining about unresolved symbols. Now, I'm compiling the modules under Linux 2.0 (they compiled fine) but I'm guessing some subtle changes have been made. I found the required symbols (under 2.0.39 they're inline functions), added the include file (<linux/isdnif.h>) to airo.c and that solved that problem.
The next problem: verbosity.
Since my laptop is rather limited in memory, I don't really run much, so any messages the kernel prints gets dumped to the console, and this driver is rather chatty. Annoyingly so. So back to the source code, comment out the messages, and we're good to go.
I had ssh1 installed but since there are issues with it, I decided to go ahead and install OpenSSH [3] (since I already have it compiled for Linux 2.0). That was harder to get working than getting on the network. Regenerated the keys three or four times (on this laptop, that's not a fast operation), installing PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules), playing with configuration files and all it turns out to be is a permission problem on /dev/tty. Sigh. I still have problems with scp (secure copy—I keep getting “protocol error: unexpected <newline>”) but I'll solve that soon enough.
But this wireless network is soooo sweet. The ability to walk anywhere (well, within a few hundred feet) and still be online. So I can now sit out in the courtyard and work, or (like I am now) hanging out with Rob as he sets up a file server for the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere and watching Junkyard Wars and still being online.
But then again, you knew I was a geek to begin with.
[1] http://www.tragic-smurfs.com/