Before you get bored and stop reading, does anyone have a PCMCIA Wireless card they know works in Linux that they can sell to me? I don’t want model names in comments, I don’t want “Just get one with $chipset” – that’s how I ended up with my wonky wireless card that has mysterious firmware that only works with linux when it feels like it and has terrible range. Really, there was all sorts of information about my card working fine in linux. Except I ordered online and got the version 2 card – bad news, which I only learned after I received the card. I am just tired of reading the tiny fine print about version numbers and chipsets and want someone to hand me a wireless card that works. I’ll pay! For the card! For the shipping! If you’re local I’ll buy you a beer too! Anyone?
EDIT
Of course what prompted this was that my card stopped working in Ubuntu again. There is a bug in Dapper that caused me to stick with Breezy, but then the card stopped working in Breezy (what was it, a kernel upgrade? Probably…). With Breezy’s EOL coming up quickly I decided that I should give up on wireless for now and just do a big old update on this laptop and tweak the newer version of Ubuntu to get it to work. Or beg people on LJ and at local meetings for pcmcia wireless cards that work in Linux.
So I did the upgrade. Breezy to Dapper caused xorg to get uninstalled (boo!) but because of my experience running Debian Testing I’ve become an expert at fixing X, I had it up and running and the proper modules reinstalled in a matter of minutes, no big problem. Then I did the Dapper to Edgy upgrade, which went almost flawlessly – the exception being that XFCE forgot all my settings and I needed to set everything up again, annoying, but I sort of expected it.
This laptop is 500mhz with 128M ram, so I notice when things change too much where speed is concerned. The laptop boots up faster with Edgy, and XFCE4 is faster and prettier. I’m not happy with Firefox2 though, I was unhappy with the weight of 1.5, but 2.0 is worse. I ended up installing Opera last night, which I’m using now. I am not the biggest fan of opera for a browser I’d use every day (still too many rendering problems and I just don’t like some bits of it… plus I miss my google toolbar), but this laptop is just a toy and all I need is a basic browser that renders most pages ok.