Had a good day Friday, after failing to get relevant information from the manufacturer (been requesting for what seems to be a lifetime). Finally manged to get the 2D barcode imager functional under Linux, what a feeling of accomplishment.

All other significant hardware is supported by the 2.6.30 Gentoo Kernel.  However the finger print reader, camera and HSDPA modem have not been tested as they are not required for the application the unit is going to be used for.

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Usually when I need to merge avi files I use avimerge (part of the transcode package), however recently the output of this suffered some serious audio sync issues. So along comes mencoder (part of the mplayer package):

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy input_1.avi  input_2.avi -o output.avi

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I have some Linux compatible PCMCIA/PCCard WiFi adapters available for purchase.  They are all in good condition (some are as new, only used for testing purposes). They are detailed below, if you require any further information then please feel free to contact me.

15 11 x Cisco Aironet 350 Series – AIR-PCM352 (AIR PCM350 Series) – PCMCIA – WEP (64/128).

3 x Cisco Aironet 350 Series – AIR-LCM352 (AIR LCM350 Series) – PCMCIA – WEP (64/128) – Without detachable antenna.

1 x Cisco Aironet 350 Series – AIR-LCM352 (AIR LCM350 Series) – PCMCIA – WEP (64/128) – With detachable antenna.

6 4 x Cisco Aironet 802.11a/b/g - AIR-CB21AG-E-K9 – PCCard (32bit) – WEP (64/128)/WPA/WPA2.

3 2 x Orinoco Gold – PC24E-H-FC (Lucent Technologies) – PCMCIA (16bit) – WEP (64/128).

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I needed to upgrade a couple of WiFi systems at home the other week and opted for a couple of USB WiFi dongles (Gentoo is used as the Operating System on these systems using a 2.6.25 kernel):

D-Link Wireless N USB Mini-Adapter – DWA-140 (H/W Ver: B1 F/W Ver: 1.00)
Belkin N Wireless USB Adapter – F5D8053uk (Ver: v3000uk)

Both of these adapter contain the Ralink RT2870USB (rt2870) chipset. So if you are not worried about doing some kernel module compiling then simply download the required driver from the Ralink website. Then uncompress the archive and change directory to the driver. Now for the Belkin Adapter you will need to add a single line to the code (VID/PID):

Add the following to the line to the include/rt2870.h file:

 {USB_DEVICE(0x050D,0x8053)}, /* Belkin */             \
+{USB_DEVICE(0x050D,0x815C)}, /* Belkin F5D8053 */     \

To enable the use of wpa_supplicant you may wish to edit the ‘os/linux/config.mk’ file as follows:

HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y

Then type ‘make’, when the make process completes successfully type ‘make install’. You should now have the required kernel module installed on your system. There is a configuration file for this module, located within the /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA directory. Follow the directions given in the modules README file when editing this file (a copy of my configuration is located below:

RT2870STA.dat

I have this working with WPA2 and running at around 300Mb/s. Out of the two modules the D-Link Adapter has performed slightly better than the Belkin, and it was slightly cheaper.

While on the subject of WiFi and Linux, I also have a Belkin N Wireless Express Card Adapter used within a Laptop. This is a Belkin F5D8073 (ver. 3000x):

This works with Gentoo and the Ralink RT2860PCI (rt2860) kernel module. There were no changes required to the source when using this module, although your kernel must be configured with PCI Express support. There is a configuration file for this module, located within the /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA directory. Follow the directions given in the modules README file when editing this file (a copy of my configuration is located below:

RT2860STA.dat