[Wftl-lug] FC6

[Charles McColm]

On 8/14/07, tdsnm at netscape.net <tdsnm at netscape.net> wrote:
>  I'm not sure what you're referring to about wireless here.  Generally the
> setup in Linux for wireless is very similar for me across different
> distributions etc.  IWCONFIG usually gets the job done.

Hi Roger. Unfortunately there are a number of wireless cards that are
not well supported under Linux (they're supported, just not well).
It's a chicken in the egg problem. Of course we'd have better support
if the manufacturers would open up more. But we can't just lay the
blame at their feet and tell everyone "make sure you buy a notebook
with wireless xxxx card inside." In most cases retailers don't
advertise what wireless chipset a system is using.

For my part I'm learning C programming on Linux. Because I see a wide
variety of devices I have a bit more opportunity to look at hardware
that might not be supported (most of the time it is in my experience).

I think I've mentioned quite a few times in here that 100% of our
staff and volunteers find it easier to install Linux on refurbished
systems than Windows 98. Linux simply has more drivers out of the box
than Win98. We can get Win98 cheaply, but not XP (not yet at least).
Linux is a great solution.

We generally don't do notebooks here, but I've been installing Linux
and FreeBSD on notebooks for the past 9 years. A lot has changed
(remembering over 50 floppies for 1 FreeBSD install I did - thank
goodness I eventually got a docking station).

Cheers,

Charles