My parents had gotten me a wireless presentation clicker for my birthday. It's really neat -- it's the size of a PCMCIA card -- and it has various buttons, and has a built in laser pointer. It's actually designed to fit inside a PCMCIA slot in your laptop so you don't forget your clicker :-)

It's harder to setup than one might expect, however. It's USB. I popped the dongle into the USB slot, and the light didn't come up. Nuts. Running Gentoo, I immediatly suspected the options I had compiled my kernel with. I went through, enabled a few more options, and recompiled. Nothing.

I tried it on Shana's Gentoo laptop, same problem. Huh.

I took it to work, maybe I'd have some better luck there. I stuck it into my desktop, and it lit right up. Well, at least it works. So, all I should have to do is copy that kernel config to my home box. After doing that, and recompiling -- nothing. Ugh!

I began looking around Google, but I saw very few mentions of this sort of thing in Linux. Thoughts of hardware incompatability began to cross my mind.

One last ditch effort -- I fired up an old laptop whose hard drive had died, simply to see if it might work. Unlike the laptop I had tried -- this USB slots in it were configured horizontally, not vertically. I had to think for a moment, which direction would the dongle fit. Wait a moment... if the dongle fits either way...

Bah! I was putting it in upside down. Correcting that, it works perfectly. The buttons all work, distance is good, and the laser pointer is a nice touch. No more filling up both hands with gadgets to give a presentation.

I have a presentation coming up in early may, on building a wireless router with Gentoo. Josiah and I had discussed some titles for a similar talk he had done. Since he passed it up, I'm going to go with "Pass Gentoo the Pipe". It just seems so, appropriate :-)