How I got my Hawking HWP54G PCI wireless card working with Linux, and links to drivers, instructions and forums so that you can do it too.

If you came here through a search engine link, you should try my updated post for more details and tons of links.

(This, I guess, is going to be my standard intro whenever I discuss this topic.)

On the lighter side, yesterday I was contacted directly by someone who was trying to get his Hawking HWP54G PCI wireless card working with Linux, in this case Slackware 10.1. It’s the first time anyone other than a friend has asked me for advice about Linux, and I feel like I’ve now been inducted into the Linux community at large. It’s especially interesting that this user contacted me from Italia. With David’s permission, I have posted the entire email exchange.

I’m assuming David found me through a search engine. Like I’ve said before, search engine hits involving some permutation of “linux” “hawking” “hwp54g” and distro names are the biggest source of traffic to my website. (Well, except for a couple of weeks earlier this month, when my post on mpip.org made my Cancer Survivor post the number one entry point outside of feeds and bot crawls.) I checked my logs and in the last two days I got two redirects from google.it using the terms “driver fedora ralink” and eleven from google.com that included “hwp54g”. So I ran the google.it search myself and saw that I was ranked number 9 out of 9,260 hits, and on google.com I’m 16th out of 11,900 for “hwp54g” and 6 out of 554 for “hwp54g linux”. Pretty cool! It’s amazing how much higher I appear in the Google search results since my site went from a RageRank of 2 to a 3, something I didn’t discover until a friend looked for my blog and told me that I was the number one result for “greg perry san diego”, out of 1,790,000! That was November 1st, and I hadn’t bothered to check my PageRank for three months. I’ve been meaning to crow about this since then, which shows how busy I’ve been.

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, My Website, Networking, OS at 21:15 PST

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John Waters, 1964 yearbook photo

My friend and coworker, John Forest Waters, died last night at 17:15 PST. In the last seven years when I knew him, he was cantankerous, stubborn, often opinionated, intelligent, direct, and getting a rise out of him was very entertaining. I loved him dearly.

Working and traveling with John was always a great pleasure. His command of corrosion control was deep and insightful, even if he preferred to have others do the calculations for him that always just ended up showing he had made the right choices initially. He was also a cold war warrior. One night on the road, after a couple of drinks, I found out that his fluency in Russian and German had been acquired back in the sixties, when he had been seconded by the Army to the not-then-acknowledged NSA as an intercept operator, and that he had found himself a little too forward of the lines one August night, 1968, in Czechoslovakia. One of my strongest and favorite memories of him will always be his reaction when I showed him the NSA for Kids website.

John, like me, was a second generation corrosion engineer. His father, F. Otto Waters, was one of the pioneers of the corrosion control industry. It’s interesting that he, like his brother Don and me, seemed to have sought escape from his destiny by joining the Army, but we all ended up back in the field that we started in during summers in high school. Otto’s company, Waters Consultants, (and John) was passed on to PSG Corrosion Engineering, which eventually became part of Corrpro Companies, Inc.

In the near future I’ll be thinking a lot about his wife, Barby, and and his sister Holly. But right now I’m grieving for my own loss.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends at 07:23 PST

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