[Nottingham] LAN Party, Install-fest, Linux fun: Sun 12/11/06

[Martin Garton]

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 14:54 +0000, Michael Erskine wrote:

> > And... the whoosh was more like a Keyston Cops sliding around and
> > falling down episode (as in Charlie Chaplin for the youngsters). The
> > D-Link box suffers very random operation for the "factory defaults"
> > reset switch and my very old scavenged ethernet card added to the server
> > gave dubious results. A second Belkin WiFi firewall/router box didn't
> > support acting as a client. Swapping in a more recent ethernet card
> > helped to then find the D-Link box problem. Martin G came to the rescue
> > with a USB WiFi dongle with aerial that just simply worked.
> 
> Sounds like a useful piece of kit. What is it marting?

It's an actiontec 802.11b usb adapter.  It has an atmel chipset which is
pretty well supported by an available driver, although I don't think its
in mainline still.  It's a few years old now, but often comes in handy.

> > ifconfig wlan0 up ineedbroadband

It was probably something more like: 

iwconfig wlan0 essid ineedbroadband && dhclient wlan0

> There's dozens of half-arsed networking GUI front ends that all just call 
> ifconfig(8), iwconfig(8), and/or ip(8) under the hood and thus far most of 
> them can only handle the simplest of cases.

I agree. Putting layers of (often buggy) pointy clicky things in between
the user and the real commands is no fun IMO.  It feels like working in
a straitjacket.  Admittedly these sorts of GUI based tools are useful
for many folks though, some of whom would otherwise probably not choose
Linux.

Anyway, I agree it was a good event.

-- 
Martin.