dmesg junk with the EW7811-UN WiFi adapter

I posted awhile back on my Google+ account about my issues with the Edimax EW7811-UN WiFi adapter that worked great with the RasPi, but got no love under Ubuntu. It's an awesome little device...when it works...and it's so tiny! Anyway, a cool cat named Cian McGovern has a great write-up (don't forget to go to the Comment he mentions in the post) at http://www.cianmcgovern.com/getting-the-edimax-ew-7811un-working-on-linux/

One other issue - by default the Realtek driver has power saving turned on. What you get is a whole buncha crap like this in dmesg:

[ 1139.170000] rtl8192c_dm_RF_Saving(): RF_Normal
[ 1139.170000] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 1, SmartPS = 2
[ 1139.850000] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Busy Traffic , Leave 802.11 power save.. 
[ 1139.850000] rtl8192c_set_FwPwrMode_cmd(): Mode = 0, SmartPS = 0
[ 1141.170000] rtl8192c_dm_RF_Saving(): RF_Save
[ 1145.170000] rtw_set_ps_mode(): Enter 802.11 power save mode...
I noticed the same junk spilling into dmesg on my Raspberry Pi, and I saw a lot of messages doing a Google search with people wanting to get rid of all this debug(?) stuff. I believe there's flags when you compile the driver to shut it off at that level, but even easier is to:

1. Create a file called 8192cu.conf in /etc/modprobe.d
2. In that file put "options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0" (without the quotes)
3. Easiest thing to do after you've created the file is to restart your box.

The above is love from http://linux-sunxi.org/Wifi, and whomever wrote that is now my new best friend for the day - to bad there's only 3 more hours in this day. :-)

First dip into the Linux SDR pool...

Having just got my new Linux box setup (primary home and work computers being Wintel 7, but I'm doing my best with this work computer to do everything in Linux starting by installing Linux Mint), I'm working on getting an SDR setup done. So far it looks like GQRX by OZ9AEC is a good app to investigate, knowing that SDR# runs under Mono and that'd be to easy. GQRX-SDR looks like it does just enough to get my feet wet, while also letting me investigate how Linux SDR works.

So first thing is to install QT, and in this case I'm opting for QT 4.7. QT5.0 is out, but I'm not wanting to go bleeding edge just yet. :-)

I downloaded the source and started to go through the official compile instructions on the official site, and right away got weird errors trying to do the make. The "configure" went fine, but there actually was no make file created. Ok, time for Plan B...which is to just do apt-get a few times.

I wholeheartedly recommend the wikihow.com tutorial here. The install went flawless.

Next step: Get GQRX-SDR installed.