In a refreshing break from political posts, I’m going to rejoice in the bounty that is white-space airwaves made free and open. With all TV broadcast going digital, there will be many chunks of EM spectrum between digital TV channels. This is known as white-space, or unused digital TV spectrum. The FCC voted 5-0 to make these unused frequencies available in the same sense CB, 802.11 and walkie talkie frequencies are. What does this mean? Why the big fuss? Well, not only does it mean more frequencies available for wireless internet and other uses, it also means longer range for wireless internet and other things. These are the same frequencies that TV signals are broadcast long distances on, remember. It is very exciting. Some call it wifi on steroids. Along those lines, think Digis (or insert wireless provider here) on steroids. Room for more wireless ISPs and at greater range, therefore less base stations, more customers, more competition, and lower costs all around! But it’s not just about wireless providers, or even just internet, my brother wants to build a GPS receiver that transmits the raw data home for actual position calculation, offloading the hard work, making the mobile unit simpler and cheaper. The newly available spectrum means for him more range and less interference. Exciting times!
0 commentsI reinstalled my Asus EeePC 701 this morning with Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” final release. To my surprise the wireless no longer worked whereas it did in previous releases (beta, etc). Jumping into IRC I was able to find a fix however, and here it is.
Installing Backported Kernel Modules
You’ll need to install a backported kernel module package. In order to do this you’ll also need to activate the backports repository. You can do that in two ways.
- Navigate to System > Admin > Software Sources :: Updates :: (intrepid-backports)
- Add “
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse“
After you’ve done either of the above you can then run these commands to install the package:
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
echo “blacklist ath_pci” | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
At this point you should be able to reboot and you’re done. Enjoy.