Falling short of adjectives..

1000 hrs IST. It was a live 'telecast'. Pallavi and I were all ears and looking intently at the screen. The radiologist took a while to adjust the zoom level and setup an appropriate viewing angle. After 60 odd seconds, tears welled up in my eyes. Tears of joy, of course.

We were viewing the sonogram of our fetus, aged approximately 13 weeks. At that age, we could clearly see a very cute little nose and small lips. The head was about half the length of the fetus body size. This changes as the baby grows, we were told. As the radiologist moved the transducer (probe), we could see the remainder of the fetus. And as I saw the cardiac activity (heart beats), my heart skipped a beat. The heartbeat rate was visibly fast, approximated at 168 bpm! Almost twice than the average adult heartbeat rate. And then we focussed on the petite fingers - oh so sweet :)

I was trying to store as much of the video as I could in my permanent storage, since we wouldn't be able to lay our hands on the film (neither the video nor any image).

Putting very simply, it's one of the best things that has happened to me.

Got a Compaq Presario C797VU today. Installed Fedora Core 9 (Sulphur). Installation was a breeze, everything was just fine till I realised that configuring the onboard wireless device wasn't going to be easy.

Read up a lot of forums, did a lot of jazz, played around with the system, and what you need to do is the following:

1) Identify current kernelversion, identify exact wireless card model
# uname -r
# lspci | grep Atheros
2) Download package kernel-devel matching current kernelversion [kernel-devel-$(uname -r).rpm] using rpmfind.net (do not use yum install!)
3) Install package kernel-devel downloaded from rpmfind.net
# rpm -ivh kernel-devel-$(uname -r).rpm
4) Download madwifi drivers (latest stable version) from madwifi.org
5) Build madwifi drivers [assume drivers are downloaded to ./madwifi directory]
# cd madwifi
# make
# make install
# modprobe ath_pci
# modprobe ath_hal
6) Confirm that system recognises your wireless device
# iwconfig | egrep 'ath|wifi'
You're ath0 device is the one you're concerned with.
7) Configure your wireless device settings using GUI or any suitable way
8) You're done!

Just do it!

For reference sake, tech specs:

Laptop: NB Compaq Presario C700 series
Model: C797VU
CPU: intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2 Ghz (2 MB L2 Cache)
FSB: 667 Mhz
RAM: 2 GB DDR-II (1 GB default, I ordered an additional 1 GB)
Wireless: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)