Debian unstable has been installed onto the laptop. I don’t remember why I decided to switch to unstable, maybe because Firefox was still at 1.0.something, or that OpenOffice.org was still at 1.x. Anyway, it’s up and going.
The Broadcom wifi nic that’s in this beast is apparently only supported by the ndiswrapper drivers, which I’d love to try, but there’s a package dependency problem with it right now (hey, they call it unstable for a reason, no complaints). So I’m forced to go with a PC Card wifi, for which I’ve got a Proxim Gold card, finally working.
Our building (and at home, too, ftm) are using WPA which apparently isn’t supported in the stock Linux kernels, so there’s a “wpa_supplicant” daemon and configuration to handle that. I’ve got it going, and working with the Lab’s WPA PSK system, but it sure wasn’t easy, as the instructions say to use the generic wlan device driver for wpa_supplicant if you’re using Linux 2.6.x, which I am. I could never get it to authenticate. So, I went back and told wpa_supplicant to use the actual driver for the card, in my case, madwifi. Hooked right up.
So, lesson learned: Screw the documentation, hack around with it until you get it working. This part of Linux I definitely remember. Docs aren’t sexy, docs don’t ‘scratch the itch’ of the cool programmers working on Open Source Software, for the most part, so they don’t get done, and, generally, when docs are written, they’re poor.
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