I upgraded FC3 and got a new kernel: 2.6.11-1.27. This kernel supports the ipw2200 wireless correctly, although you may still need to get the updated acerhk module to enable the wireless after you power off and then back on. Once the wireless hardware is enabled, I think it stays enabled past soft reboots, but probably not past cold reboots. Since I used a protected wireless config at home, I needed to be able to configure the wireless either for home (static IP) or at the local coffee shop (DHCP). So I wrote two scripts, one for home and one for public nets, and call them from a panel launcher in gnome. The AnyNet script looks like this:

Unfortunately, you have to recompile this kernel to make the psmouse (CONFIG_MOUSE_PS) a loadable moudule. By default, the FC3 kernels come with psmouse built into the kernel and because of this the Synaptics pad doesn't register correctly – it shows up under /proc/bus/input/devices as a “Generic PS/2 Mouse”. To fix the problem you recompile the kernel with the psmouse configured as a loadable module, install the new kernel (and modules) and add this line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias psmouse psmouse

By doing this you load the psmouse driver after the USB driver has loaded, which allows the Synaptics pad to properly get properly registered and allows the X synaptic driver to load when X comes up. Then you get all the neat features of the synaptics pad, like corner taps and side/bottom scrolls.

With both the wireless and synaptics problems solved, I'm off to find a solution to the ACPI battery problem. Current plan: disable battery and ac-adapter support for ACPI so that I can use legacy APM support for that, then install the ACPI Smart Battery System. It looks like this will require rebuilding the kernel with a small patch applied and disabling the battery/ac-adapter ACPI support.

Let's go rebuild the kernel one more time….