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Our Blogs Open Sauce Feisty in wireless land | Feisty in wireless land |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 28 August 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 When I booted the laptop it gave me the added option (along with entries for all the Debian kernels) of using my new grub entry to boot. Once I chose this, the installation got under way. I only panicked once, when the downloading of software seemed to get stuck at 6 per cent for a long time; this proved to be a false alarm and the whole thing went throught to completion. Ubuntu was finally installed on the laptop. The wireless capabilities of Ubuntu, however, proved disappointing. The wireless card I have is a NetGear WG511v2; there are no Linux drivers so one has to use a wrapper and the Windows drivers to get it to work. On Debian, I had used a manual procedure which is outlined at this address : it worked without a problem. On Ubuntu, there are a few, seemingly more polished, ways of doing the same thing but the results weren't as good. I installed the necessary wrapper and some additional needed software; this resulted in a menu item called "Windows wireless drivers" being created. I used the graphic utility that this called up to install the Netgear driver and was then presented with a puzzle after I quit and restarted the utility - there is an entry where the presence of a wireless card should be indicated but it says: "Hardware present: No." The funny thing is that when I highlighted this and changed its properties (using an option titled Configure Network) to enter the IP address which I wanted the wireless card to have, it was accepted! But other required details like the encryption key and name of the wireless network, though also entered in the same place, were not accepted. Initially when I used the laptop, I had to enter the encryption key and network name manually to go out on the net through my wireless access point. But later I found that when I manually commented out all the settings for the ethernet card on the laptop, the wireless connection worked without any intervention! Funny and certainly not logical. But I'll probably keep Ubuntu on the laptop until the next release (Grinning Gorilla/Gutsy Gibbon/Generous Giraffe) and see how good Ubuntu is at a seamless upgrade. |
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