On 4/24/05, Eric Shubes <plug@shubes.net> wrote:

It's certainly far from easy. Unless, of course, your wireless device
contains a chipset for which there *are* linux drivers. ;) Prism and
orinoco come to mind. Broadcom is a real "stick in the mud".

There were two Dell Latitute (i600?) notebooks at the IF yesterday that
had Ubunto installed. One wireless worked, the other didn't. They were
apparently identical, until we looked "under the hood" (lspci -v). One
had Intel wireless, the other Broadcom (both built-in). Turned out, the
guy with the Intel had ordered it specifically with the Intel wireless
chipset. He didn't know how smart that move was at the time.

I'm curious, Donn. Apparently WPA is working with linux/ndiswrapper on
the Broadcom?
(WEP is finally working for my ACX111 (TI), but WPA isn't there yet)

Also, which chipset is in your AWLC4030?

Donn Shumway wrote:

> Although I can appreciate the opinion of Veronica Mars ;), and of the
> latest Linux distro flavor of the month, Wireless on Linux is hardly
> easy. It's a hornet's nest out there.
>
> I have a Fujitsu N3010 with a Broadcom BCM4306 which works perfectly on
> the dark side. I have a few requirements on how wifi should work for my
> network. First, my wifi router is already setup with WPA PSK encryption
> and it needs to work the same on Linix or I have to change it every time
> I want to login. Second, my host does not broadcast it's SSID and I
> don't want to change that either.
>
> I struggled with setting up wifi on it with Suse 9.2 for a month and
> gave up. I even tried the Linuxant Driverloader and could not get it to
> work. I finally wiped Suse off the disk and went with someting I am
> familiar with that has supposedly worked for other in this combination,
> Madr[ake]iva, and their latest incarnation 2005 LE. I have used Mandrake
> for years and I am very familiar with it (use what you know when there's
> a problem). I went through the same steps as I did with Suse and it
> would not work with any of the three drivers I had. Then, digging
> through the ndiswrapper wiki, I found reference to a Dell driver for
> this chipset. I downloaded it, installed it, loaded the module, and
> Bingo, everything worked. Go figure.
>
> I also have a PMCCIA Airlink AWLC4030 and have not gotten close to
> getting it to work yet (with any reasonable encryption) at full speed.
>
> The moral is, it is not easy to setup wifi on Linux. Your chipset,
> distribution, driver loading method, encryption level, speed, and
> security configuration all combine to make it much more complex than it
> should be.
>
>

-Eric 'shubes'
"There is no such thing as the People;
  it is a collectivist myth.
  There are only individual citizens
  with individual wills
  and individual purposes."
-William E. Simon (1927-2000),
     Secretary of the Treasury (1974-1977)
  "A Time For Truth" (1978), pg. 23