Lenovo B560: upgrade Debian squeeze to wheezy kills Wi-Fi

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 15:51

Upgraded Debian squeeze to wheezy and lost Wi-Fi.

Symptoms:

  • Right click on Network Manager icon -> Enable wireless is not checked. Attempt to check is has no effect
  • rfkill list lists ireless network as soft blocked
  • Attempt to enable Wi-Fi with rfkill unblock or using function key while Network Manager is running hangs the system

Installing Debian squeeze on Lenovo B560 (fixing touchpad and internal microphone issues)

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Sat, 03/12/2011 - 23:37

Having installed Debian squeeze on my Lenovo B560 I ran into a couple of problems:

  • the touchpad refused to work (cursor jumped all over the screen and spurious clicks happened)
  • the internal microphone didn't work

Actually both of this problems (as I now know) are already fixed in recent versions of linux kernel (for the touchpad problem) and alsa drivers (for the microphone problem). So what I needed was to update the specified components but I didn't want to switch to testing (testing actually don't have the fixes ) or unstable and I decided to update only the broken components manually.

James Gosling сomment regarding the claim, put forward by Oracle against Google

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 18:31

Of course, I run a great risk of repetition, but I just fill I must give a link to the comment of James Gosling (the Java author) regarding the news about the lawsuit put forward by Oracle against Google. All I can tell is that the comment header at 100% reflects my filling.

CCNA

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 21:38

CCNA certificate logo

I have finally received my first Cisco certificate. Now I can legally put here the logo.

Well, in fact, I could do that as soon as my exam results were approved, but I wanted to get my printed certificate.

Apple Care doesn't care much in Russia

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 22:19

In U.S.A you you can come to AppleStore with broken MacBook saying, that it was you only mean of earning money and they would give you a brand new one in a couple of days.

Yesterday exactly 3 months has passed since I have left my MacBook Pro 17" in service center. Well, this MBP is not actually mine, but is given to me by my employer, but this doesn't really matter. Guys at local authorized Apple reseller im.Time (site in Russian) keep saying the replacement motherboard is being delayed by Russian customs.

bsnmp-ucd returns incorrect value of ssCpuRawSoftIRQ

Published by Oleg Sharoyko on Mon, 06/07/2010 - 23:34

I was researching an issue with high system part of CPU load at one of our servers. While working on it I fond that bsnmp-ucd we use to monitor our server reports incorrect value of ssCpuRawSoftIRQ. According to MIB it must be "The number of 'ticks' (typically 1/100s) spent processing software interrupts." bsnmp-ucd uses value of vm.stats.sys.v_soft sysctl, which in turn is just a number of software interrupts. Hope I'll have a time to send bug report.