Wifi in Linux annoys me.
After working on it yesterday evening and then this morning before work I was pretty fed up with the behavior of wireless on my new Debian install. It worked fine in Ubuntu. It even worked fine during the Debian installation! Arrrgg… Maybe I’ll load up the installer just so I can see what’s loaded up and file a proper bug report. Anyway, I finally resigned for asking for help, and decided upon asking in #ubuntu-pennsylvania – where Joe Terranova pretty much read a forum thread I’d browsed earlier but didn’t think helped. Thanks again Joe, sometimes my brain stops working, and your suggestions were right on. Turns out the system was loading up the orinoco_cs module, and what I really needed loaded was the hostap driver because of network encryption (wpa or wep or something… I am wireless terms dumb)
So why have I forsaken Ubuntu on my laptop? My laptop has had Ubuntu on it longer than any other machine I have! It just make more sense to run Debian on it. I don’t need the new flashy things Ubuntu has (except, perhaps, better wifi support *snicker*), my Ubuntu install was pretty much a server install + xfce (so not exactly Xubuntu). More importantly (and the reason I didn’t just give up on Debian when wireless started acting up) is that my current development machine running Debian is dying. Right now it takes two boots for it to come up – every time I try to boot it up it says “Cannot find Operating System” – I hit the power button and then it comes up fine. What if it didn’t someday and I needed to get some Debian development work done? That would suck. So I figured I could use this laptop more. I can use it as my portable toy and keep it around for development too. Too bad I just put that “Powered by Ubuntu” sticker on it. Hehe.
“Debian development?! I thought you were an Ubuntu Member!” – Debian and Ubuntu work closely together, and both the packages I currently handle have been scooped into Ubuntu through their syncing process. I didn’t even need to do a thing, but if I do sometime need to put my hand in on the Ubuntu side – I’ll jump in! So since this syncing thing happens, I figured I can put my development time toward Debian so both Debian and Ubuntu has this stuff, everybody wins :) Not to mention all the development work I’ve done thus far has been for work, and so Debian-specific. I’m looking to change that though, after some encouragement from Miriam Ruiz I joined the Debian Games Team and she offered to help me get started (even said she’d find an “easy” package for me!). Learning more on my own with Debian is fun (and *ahem* pretty important for my career), so I figure this is the best path I can be taking right now. Now to shuffle my priorities again so I can handle this…