Linux Wireless

Funny thing... The other day I was screwing around with Knoppix at work and I was finally able to get the damn Linksyst wireless card to work under Linux. However, for the life of me I cannot get that hellish thing to work properly under Windows ME - go figure.

The trick here is to grab the original windows drivers. In my case I needed a *.inf file and a *.sys file (for some reason I got complaints back from the system) when I just used the inf files. I used the nidswapper that comes bundled in Knoppix 4.6 to import these drivers. I'll dig out the details later but I think this was all it took to get wlan0 operational for me.

The rest was just a cake-walk. I used Knoppix wavelan config script and set up all the wireless network info and then network configuration script to get the DHCP going. And that was all it took. I was amazed how easy it was - considering my struggle with the hellish winmodem at home.

I was so impressed with Knopp after that, that I actually did a HD install on one of the office spare HD's. So now I have a pseudo-Debian running on my office laptop. And I'm beggining to see why people go so crazy for Deb. I can't get over how cool apt-get is. I installed 5 apps right of the bat including firefox and thunderbird - and no dependency bullshit, no unclean installs, no nothing. Beautifull! I'm really considering trashing the Mandrake (or confining it to a small partition) and seriously looking into Debian for my desktop...