I was so happy to learn that the 2.6.26 kernel had a free as in speech alternative to the madwifi Atheros driver, ath5k. I have not been so happy that it has been crashing my machine periodically. Since diagnosis of a hung machine without a serial console that is running X is nigh on impossible, I had no choice but to fold and go back to madwifi. However, since then, I have moved on to 2.6.27, which has some changes to two wireless APIs, causing the madwifi driver to fail to build. I wanted to leave my desk with its hard-wired connection but didn’t want my machine to hang again. So I determined to forward port the madwifi driver to work with 2.6.27.
Here’s where I showed myself that I am starting to get git. I was able to dig through the commit logs to find the appropriate changes and make applicable changes to the madwifi driver. Fortunately for me, I was able to make all the changes without too much trouble. I don’t know how many times I have “learned” git. I have been to tutorials, read the man pages, and gone over my notes time and time again. I guess that I finally have reached a critical mass of knowledge such that I was not so scared of not being able to do what I wanted to do that I could simply do what I wanted to do. Woohoo. Yes, I admit that while I may not be half as smart as this ugly brain-child of Linus Torvalds, at least I can learn to be its master. Next step: ditch SVN. No really, the next step would be to diagnose the ath5k hang issue and post a patch to LKML. Now that would be truly great. But it is a task for another day.