Re: WiFi under Linux - rant no 7

Timothy Murphy <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Douglas Mayne wrote:

It is obvious from reading this newsgroup
that many people _do_ have problems setting up WiFi.
And in my opinion Linux is very, very bad at helping them.

Things evolve under GNU/Linux, with support becoming better over time for
more devices/protocols. If you have to wait for someone to
/* wizardize */ the solution so it will be palatable for you, then
you'll have to wait longer in general. Also, if you are starting with
unsupported hardware, then you might have to wait indefinitely for
support. If you want support /* now */, then you have to pursue other
options. You can write the code yourself, or set a bounty for the work to
be done, etc. It won't magically appear because you wish that it
existed.

Sorry, but that is just not relevant to the point at issue.
There is no list as far as I know of WiFi devices supported by Linux.

I'm talking about cards that certainly do work under Linux,
so there is no question of writing code for them.
But it is often absurdly difficult, in my view, to set up WiFi.
Where do you set the WEP key?

Depends on the distribution.

How do you tell if it is ASCII or hex?
Where do you set the ESSID?
Why can't Linux tell me that it hears a remote system,
but I have to give the correct WEP code,
as Windows does?

It does
iwlist s
will list all of the AP the card can find. Under encryption, on means you
need a WEP key. The essid is listed (or hidden in which case you have to
know it.)



Windows tells me there are 4 networks it sees,
and asks me to choose between them.
Linux either connects my laptop to my desktop,
or else it doesn't, and doesn't tell me anything.

YOu did not ask it.


To maximize all of the contributions made by the entire free
software/open source movement, you need to learn to use the source. Look
for a distribution which gives you the power to do that. If you don't,
then you are at a disadvantage. People, like me, will point out that
it could be working for you- because you asked the question. I won't tell
you how to fix RedHat/Fedora because I gave up on that approach. If
you need RH/FC fixed on your system, then _your_ work is in front of you.

Although I usually use Fedora, this issue has nothing to do with that.
My rant actually came from setting up WiFi on an old ThinkPad I bought
last weekend, which was running Slax with vmware .
I found it quite hard to work out how vmware-player worked,
but that is a different issue.

An old computer with an old operating system? Hmm, I seem to have a lot of
trouble setting up wifi on my Commodore 80 as well.



What annoyed me was that when I had vmware set up,
and my WiFi card was working, to the extent that the light on it
was flashing, indicating that it was receiving and sending packets,
there was no obvious indication of why it was not linking to my LAN.
I found in the end that the WEP key was being read in ASCII,
rather than hex, because I had used lower case abcdef.
So my machine knew what I wanted to link to,
and had exchanged packets with that machine.
Why then didn't it tell me what the problem was?

Probably because you did not ask it.
Apparently you finally did.


Part of using GNU/Linux (and other OSs as well) is learning how to fix it
when its broken. This is one area where the various distributions
diverge. Some distro's don't expect the end user to be able to fix
anything for himself, while other distro's expect that he can do simple
things, and others expect that you have compiled and bootstrapped
completely from scratch. Decide where you fit in that picture.

This had nothing to do with the distro.
As it happens, I compile a CVS version of orinoco_cs
to go with the kernel (which I also compile),
because the standard version of orinoco_cs does not seem to work
with USB devices.

That is the driver. It has absolutely nothing to do with user interaction
nor should it. The various programs which interact with the user ARE
distribution dependent. So, it certainly does have to do with the distro.



.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: WiFi under Linux - rant no 7
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