Alright, I’m sure my readers are growing weary of my geekish technical ruminations here. Too bad for you. ;-) I got ftp between my 2 machines working last night using ssh. This means that, from the laptop, I can transfer files to and from the desktop machine, all wirelessly, from whereever I happen to be. Very cool.
There are 2 things I need to work on now; the first is security to ensure that my network is reasonably safe, and the second is transfer speed. I was getting about 600kB/s in file transfers, which is about twice the typical rate I get out of my cable modem. I was expecting it to be much faster. I still don’t know much about this networking stuff; there are doubtlessly many parameters to tweak that will improve performance.
But hey; at least it’s working.
At this point there are really only 2 things left to get working optimally on my laptop. The first is getting ACPI working with the fnfx package, which will allow things like suspend to work, and make things like the volume controls etc work properly. This package will require me to recompile my Linux kernel, which I’ve done before and has its benefits; I can slim it down and get rid of things that I won’t need. The problem with it is that it’s more work, and it introduces another layer of complexity that doesn’t need to be there. I’m tempted to just leave it be and live without the ACPI features. We’ll see.
The second thing is to get the Synaptics touchpad driver. At the moment, the touchpad in my system works as a standard mouse-ish driver, but this driver would allow some advanced features of the touchpad to work.
I’ve also been updating my Linux on Toshiba page to reflect this stuff; before too much longer I should have a more concise version of that page.