I’ve had Ubuntu on a laptop of mine for a while now (mostly as a little experiment): but I’ve failed to get it to work correctly with my wireless network. It’s never liked connecting to my rather well-hidden and high-security WPA setup.

Sticking with a Netgear wg511 card, as I have been for a while under the misguided impression that better names will be more compatible, was a mistake. After a lot (and I mean a lot) of Googling, it turns out that the Netgear, and other network cards based on the prism chipset, don’t work with WPA. At all.

Pulling the Netgear wg511 card out of the laptop, I’ve changed it for the rather more bog-standard Edimax wireless card that I had knocking about the house. This apparently uses a Ralink chipset. Which - gosh - isn’t supported in Ubuntu either. But, much jumping through hoops later, with the help of a moderately confusing webpage, I’ve finally configured it.

Ubuntu is supposed to be nice and easy, but the preceding few hours (and abortive attempts before) hasn’t really shown that to me. When it works, it works fantastically well. When it doesn’t… it doesn’t. At all. And there’s a ton of confusing documentation online which, if I were in charge, I’d have mostly removed in favour of the bits that, um, work.

| Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.